I'm currently tearing my hair out with the tediously slow task of rendering out lots of clips in 4k and 6k with Prores on Windows.

I need more power and speed but I'm unsure of the best way to achieve that for my pay grade.

If I buy a monster graphics card will that help with rendering out time lapse sequences in or would it only improve RAM previews?

Right now I'm running a fairly souped up ASUS PC which is about medium level gamer spec. I've heard good things about those new monster
HP desktops that help with video editing but I'd rather just upgrade what I've got. Can anyone tell me which hardware elements are most
essential for fast rendering of time lapse sequences? Where would my money be better spent?

Thanks in advance.

I'm no expert but I would imagine RAM should be top of your shopping list... I say that from a background of 3d graphics, not 2d / compositing so take it with a pinch of salt and do some more research.

With such large frames I would imagine your computer is having to use your hard drive as virtual memory. Its called paging... when the computer has to swap out chucks of memory from the RAM to the HD. Its extremely slow, and obviously the more RAM you have the less this happens. You could check this is actually happening by using the Task Manager (I think... I've not used windows for quite some time) while you are rendering.

Hope that helps,
David.

I don't know about your software, but Adobe uses cuda acceleration, which uses processors on the graphics cart to greatly accelerate renders. I actually got a tame computer systems engineer who made my computers. He sped up my system far more than Moore's law would suggest is possible. He also gave me RAID so I never loose data even when a drive fails, and ten drives so I have room for years and years worth of turtle timelapse all online at the same time. If you don't have your own systems engineer, you can borrow mine. In America, Frank's number is (321) 396-2278 or email Frabgom@gmail.com

I'm currently at 16 GB RAM so I'll have to check what my board can go up to, I seem to recall a RAM limitation being part of Windows 7 OS. I'm rendering right now and the task manager is showing that only about half of my RAM is being used. CPU usage is at 1%.

Thanks for the contact number. What would you say gave you the biggest boost in render times? RAID is just for redundancy right? It won't improve performance.

In my Adobe Media Encoder settings I have selected 'Mercury Playback Engine GPU Acceleration (CUDA) but it's still slow as hell. My graphics card is a Nvidia Geforce GT 630.

I spoke too soon, with task manager open all the time during rendering I'm seeing huge spikes in CPU usage while the RAM usage seems to stay steady at 8-9GB.
I'd say that overall it looks like a fairly equal load on both RAM and CPU.

Can't seem to find any way to monitor the load on my graphics card.

I presume you're on 64-bit Windows 7 (not 32-bit) - right? If not, that's the first thing to fix. I believe the RAM limits in Windows 7 are:

32-bit: 4GB
64-bit: 192GB (unless you have Win 7 Home Basic, in which case it's only 8GB).

Of course, your available motherboard RAM slots may limit you to less than 192GB.

Windows 7 Home Premium at 64 bit.

I'll check my slots and see what I can upgrade to.

This begs another question though. Does Adobe Media Encoder inherit the RAM and Multi Processing settings of AE?

good article about mercury engine and nvidia http://www.studio1productions.com/Artic ... ereCS5.htm

it is not about one superior part, it is about right balance of them.

I think the main reason for my fast renders is the cuda acceleration using a good graphics card with six processors on it. The raid gives me redundancy on four virtual drives, which is really eight actual drives so each has a backup. It also gives me double the speed on one drive which is configured differently. That drive is twice as unreliable because only half the data goes to each physical drive. If either drive fails, you lose all the data, but the drive runs twice as fast. After reducing all other bottlenecks, this almost cut render time in half. I keep a safe copy of all data on the other drives, and move a temporary copy into the fast drive for rendering.

RAM is cheap. I've had 32gb for a year or two now.
You can also get an SSD for a scratch drive, that should help things.
They are also pretty cheap now.

My OS drive is a 250 GB SSD. I've also defragged all my drives.

BTW what program are you using to render to prores?
I thought Adobe doesn't do prores on PC...

I use a preset/plugin from Miraizon that allows Prores to be rendering on a Windows machine.

Thanks, maybe I'll check that later.

Fototripper - I was just looking at that codec for use in exporting full resolution timelapse from AE, specifically for use on Nimia (one of their top recommended codecs). For $50 it seems like a decent price, how've you been finding it? I've been trialling a few codecs and quality/compression ratios, using Photo JPEG (another one Nimia recommends) I'm getting massive 8Gb files for 15 second clips. My machine struggles to even play the file.

TBH Karl, I can't really see any difference between the massive prores mov files and my highest bitrate mp4 which comes out at a fraction of the size. I'm not even able to view more than a few frames of the 4K prores mov without my computer shitting the bed and breathing its dying breath.

I wonder though, if I had a monster graphics card would the mov play no trouble and display the difference in quality?

As far as the codec goes though, it seems pretty solid, no crashes while rendering.

How are you getting on with Nimia? They approached me last week and I checked the site but it looks like any other stock media site that might eventually pay me enough money to buy a 32 Mb memory card.

Sounds like you're having the exact same playback issues as I have. Another issue I'm facing (and I've asked about on here before) is a 'washed-out' look in certain media players. In the majority of my renders, the clips playback with much less black tone than the original images, as edited in PS. The only player that gives me back the original look seems to be Windows Media Player. I still don't have a proper handle on what's happening here, or how to get around this (I really want people viewing what I see in PS, not the washed out look).

That aside, I've only just signed up with Nimia yesterday after a Skype conversation with them. I was impressed that they made the effort. I've yet to even get a clip up there - still stuck on this codec / quality / file size issue before I put any work out.

I don't have any other video/timelapse work on stock sites (I have a few still stock images out there), so thought I'd give Nimia a go. Once I get the clips finalised I'll have a proper look at their licencing. Return percentages seem pretty good, but how many sales you'd make.. hard to say. I'll give it a go and see!

I get the same washed out look in Quicktime and a normal look in Windows Media Player. My guess is that this is something to do with how Quicktime playback is calibrated for Apple screens? I mean, who in their right mind would want to install Quicktime on a PC if they weren't doing the kind of custom nonsense that we're doing?

When I play the mov file on my Mac it looks less washed out but still not ideal like the WMP version.

I hope that your hours/days spent rendering clips out for Nimia turns out to be worthwhile.

Thanks for the info - good to know I'm not the only one suffering from this washed out problem.

Yes, hours/days editing and rendering is quite right ! I'm thinking about bringing my laptop into work and setup all the PS actions scripts etc at home so I can leave it batch processing next to me during the day.

Just got a reply back from Nimia, they recommend full high-res, 100% quality files. 8Gb was the smallest using Photo JPEG for a 15 second clip. Hope someone can play clips that size! Time to get uploading.

Heheh, you should be done some time around 2016

You may not be far wrong in your estimate - 8Gb upload started at 8:30 last night, was only at 42% complete at 7:30 this morning. Going to be a long process getting all these clips online!

Yep, rendering time + uploading + setting up of profile + tags and descriptions - commission = less than minimum wage per hour. I really hope that I'm wrong though and kudos to you for donating the time to try it out.