Author Topic: OT: Video rendering speed in Sony Movie Studio  (Read 37800 times)

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Offline EEVblogTopic starter

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OT: Video rendering speed in Sony Movie Studio
« on: April 02, 2013, 09:18:10 am »
There might be someone on here who knows about this:

I'm using Sony Movie Studio Platinum 12 and rendering using the Sony AVC encoder.
I have an HP DV7 notebook Win 7 64bit  i7 processor 2630QM (8 core) with 16Gb or memory and render to a 2nd 7200rpm hard drive, and a Radeon GPU for some speedup.
I'm getting just over real time rendering speed, so a 1 hour video takes just under an hour to render. That's ok.
However, my CPU usage graph shows only 4 of the 8 cores cores being used during rendering  at under 50% usage.
The older machine at the lab I also do some rendering on that has 4 cores, maxes out all 4 cores at 100% during rendering.

Q1) Why the discrepancy between the CPU usage on the two machine? Why does it not use 100% (yes I have set the app priority to max)

Q2) How much rendering speed increase could I expect by moving to a higher spec machine? And what would be the specs of the most reasonable cost machine I could upgrade to improve my rendering speed by say double?

 

Offline Skimask

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Re: OT: Video rendering speed in Sony Movie Studio
« Reply #1 on: April 02, 2013, 09:56:41 am »
The 2630QM isn't a real 8 core proc.  It's 4 cores with HyperThreading.
Depends on how the software is written whether or not those other "4 cores" will be used or not.

What CPU does the other machine have?

EDIT: Checked around a bit...
16GB is the max memory for the HP DV7 models.  Maybe a BIOS update and some new chips could take you up to 32GB.  I saw a couple of pages talking about a BIOS hack that allows it, but didn't look too trustworthy.
HD is a bit limited at the SATA2 spec vs SATA3, but I don't think that'll affect rendering speeds, which in this case are likely going to be CPU limited.
The motherboard should handle an i7-3840QM, again with a BIOS update, if you can find one for cheap.
That'll get you 2.8GHz vs 2.0GHz, with a bit more 'turbo', but since you're max'ing out the cores, the turbo speeds will be limited to heat generated, as well as 2MB more of L3 cache.
I'm assuming the 2nd HD is on the USB3.0 port.  That should be fast enough since the cores you are using are max'd out.  If they were dropping off 100% often enough, I'd think the USB interface would be a limiting factor.
All in all, 2.8GHz vs 2.0GHz, 32GB vs 16GB...  I don't see twice the speed coming out of it.  Maybe an extra 30% or so.

Switching over to the latest/greatest/fastest/bestest desktop out there to get double speed?
meh..maybe.  If you got one with the latest i7-3770K, 32+GB of good, fast DDR, a few SSDs in a RAID config...  Anything's possible...


EDIT#2:  I just saw your CPU graphs.  I'm going to go out on a limb and say that you're limiting by the writing over the USB port.
EDIT#3:  And I just saw your response about both drives being internal.  And since they're both internal, they're sharing the bus, effectively halving the max read/write rates to each drive.
« Last Edit: April 02, 2013, 10:18:03 am by Skimask »
I didn't take it apart.
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Offline peter.mitchell

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Re: OT: Video rendering speed in Sony Movie Studio
« Reply #2 on: April 02, 2013, 10:01:48 am »
Also, i'm curious as to whether the both hard drives are internal, or is one of the hard drives a USB attached drive?
 

Offline EEVblogTopic starter

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Re: OT: Video rendering speed in Sony Movie Studio
« Reply #3 on: April 02, 2013, 10:15:53 am »
Also, i'm curious as to whether the both hard drives are internal, or is one of the hard drives a USB attached drive?

Both internal.
 

Online Ed.Kloonk

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Re: OT: Video rendering speed in Sony Movie Studio
« Reply #4 on: April 02, 2013, 10:16:17 am »
I don't know windows at all but I use mencoder or sometimes ffmpeg over on the Linux.

With my i7, I found that setting cores to 6 yielded the best speed.

For the answer to question two, it depends. An application has to tell the OS how much priority to give any process it is using. And depending on the OS, and it's permissions, the OS can allow or forbid levels of priority. From idle to near real-time time slices for processes it all depends on the application and the OS and their ability to work together. Add the multi core mojo on top of that and and the stinking dog turd Windows must be to code for, it's a wonder anything works at all.

It the risk of getting all ranty, I would have thought if you paid money for both the windows OS and the sony software, you'd think that you'd get better management and utilisation of the cpu and perhaps a bit more intuitiveness so you could the best out of it.

I just have my favourite command lines for config settings and really shudder at the thought of allowing a fly be night propriety program to touch created content. Even if just to re-encode it.

For an answer on expected performance for a given hardware/software config, I'd suggest visiting http://forum.doom9.org/

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Offline EEVblogTopic starter

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Re: OT: Video rendering speed in Sony Movie Studio
« Reply #5 on: April 02, 2013, 10:17:59 am »
16GB is the max memory for the HP DV7 models.  Maybe a BIOS update and some new chips could take you up to 32GB.  I saw a couple of pages talking about a

I just upgraded to 16GB, made no difference, I'm only using a small part of it anyway.

 

Offline Skimask

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Re: OT: Video rendering speed in Sony Movie Studio
« Reply #6 on: April 02, 2013, 10:19:09 am »
Do a speed test on the laptop HD and compare it to the desktop.
I didn't take it apart.
I turned it on.

The only stupid question is, well, most of them...

Save a fuse...Blow an electrician.
 

Offline EEVblogTopic starter

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Re: OT: Video rendering speed in Sony Movie Studio
« Reply #7 on: April 02, 2013, 10:21:49 am »
Do a speed test on the laptop HD and compare it to the desktop.

The desktop is an old machine, with an old cheap 500orpm drive I believe. My main notebook has a 7200 WB Black drive in it.
 

Offline Skimask

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Re: OT: Video rendering speed in Sony Movie Studio
« Reply #8 on: April 02, 2013, 10:25:45 am »
Are you saying that the desktop machine is significantly faster than the laptop despite the differences?
Gotta more specs on the desktop?
I didn't take it apart.
I turned it on.

The only stupid question is, well, most of them...

Save a fuse...Blow an electrician.
 

Offline ddavidebor

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OT: Video rendering speed in Sony Movie Studio
« Reply #9 on: April 02, 2013, 10:32:27 am »
There might be someone on here who knows about this:

I'm using Sony Movie Studio Platinum 12 and rendering using the Sony AVC encoder.
I have an HP DV7 notebook Win 7 64bit  i7 processor 2630QM (8 core) with 16Gb or memory and render to a 2nd 7200rpm hard drive, and a Radeon GPU for some speedup.
I'm getting just over real time rendering speed, so a 1 hour video takes just under an hour to render. That's ok.
However, my CPU usage graph shows only 4 of the 8 cores cores being used during rendering  at under 50% usage.
The older machine at the lab I also do some rendering on that has 4 cores, maxes out all 4 cores at 100% during rendering.

Q1) Why the discrepancy between the CPU usage on the two machine? Why does it not use 100% (yes I have set the app priority to max)

Q2) How much rendering speed increase could I expect by moving to a higher spec machine? And what would be the specs of the most reasonable cost machine I could upgrade to improve my rendering speed by say double?

If you want to move to another computer, buy a mac with ssd disk

Final cut studio is a cheap and incredible program, and use gpu and cpu at maximun speed.
David - Professional Engineer - Medical Devices and Tablet Computers at Smartbox AT
Side businesses: Altium Industry Expert writer, http://fermium.ltd.uk (Scientific Equiment), http://chinesecleavers.co.uk (Cutlery),
 

Offline EEVblogTopic starter

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Re: OT: Video rendering speed in Sony Movie Studio
« Reply #10 on: April 02, 2013, 10:34:05 am »
Are you saying that the desktop machine is significantly faster than the laptop despite the differences?
Gotta more specs on the desktop?

Sorry, no, the desktop machine is much slower than the notebook, but uses all 4 cores at 100% usage.
The notebook is faster but uses only 30% of 4 cores, and I want to know why it's only 30%
 

Offline EEVblogTopic starter

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Re: OT: Video rendering speed in Sony Movie Studio
« Reply #11 on: April 02, 2013, 10:35:06 am »
If you want to move to another computer, buy a mac with ssd disk
Final cut studio is a cheap and incredible program, and use gpu and cpu at maximun speed.

I knew someone would say that.
No, moving to a mac and Final Cut pro is not an option. I just want to know why Sony Vegas isn't using 100% of the CPU like on my desktop machine.
 

Online Ed.Kloonk

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Re: OT: Video rendering speed in Sony Movie Studio
« Reply #12 on: April 02, 2013, 10:36:37 am »
hehehe

 :-DD
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Offline grumpydoc

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Re: OT: Video rendering speed in Sony Movie Studio
« Reply #13 on: April 02, 2013, 10:39:25 am »
You don't say what type of Radeon - have you tried it with and without the GPU "acceleration"? It might even be that the bottleneck has become the GPU

Is there a "maximum rendering threads" option in Movie Studio - what's it set at?

You shouldn't really be I/O bound with typical video stream bitrates - even 36Mb/s blu-ray is only 4.5MB/s which you can achieve easily with a USB2 connected drive never mind SATA.

I suspect you'd be better off with a desktop based around an Ivy Bridge i7 (the 3770 or 3770K is good).

 

Offline Skimask

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Re: OT: Video rendering speed in Sony Movie Studio
« Reply #14 on: April 02, 2013, 10:47:22 am »
Sorry, no, the desktop machine is much slower than the notebook, but uses all 4 cores at 100% usage.
The notebook is faster but uses only 30% of 4 cores, and I want to know why it's only 30%
That would suggest to me that there's a bottleneck in the laptop that the desktop doesn't have...e.g. the desktop can feed the cpu data better than the laptop, which again might point to the HD bus.

Also, since it's a laptop, I'm wondering if the CPU is getting hot and throttling itself after a bit of transcoding.  Doesn't make a lot of sense...but...something else to check.
I didn't take it apart.
I turned it on.

The only stupid question is, well, most of them...

Save a fuse...Blow an electrician.
 

Offline krivx

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Re: OT: Video rendering speed in Sony Movie Studio
« Reply #15 on: April 02, 2013, 11:00:29 am »
Sorry if this is an obvious answer but have you checked the laptop's power management settings? Many manufacturers will use a default setting that throttles or limits CPU performance. It doesn't matter if you are running off a battery or the mains as thermal management can be issue with many models.
 

Offline EEVblogTopic starter

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Re: OT: Video rendering speed in Sony Movie Studio
« Reply #16 on: April 02, 2013, 11:00:33 am »
You don't say what type of Radeon - have you tried it with and without the GPU "acceleration"? It might even be that the bottleneck has become the GPU

Doh, yeah, that might explain it. The notebook is using GPU acceleration, the desktop is not, hence must use 100% CPU.
Will check further...
 

Offline ecat

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Re: OT: Video rendering speed in Sony Movie Studio
« Reply #17 on: April 02, 2013, 11:10:55 am »
If the cpu is not at or near 100% (4 cores, forget about the other 4 for now) then it is waiting for something else to finish.

Hard drive is easy to rule out. Look at the HD activity light(s), if it's on all the time then the HD is probably the bottleneck, if the light is flashing more often off than on the HD is probably not the bottleneck. Avoid USB drives for now.

I just ran a gpu assisted test render here on my i5 (4 core) using Movie Studio 12.0 . 12:30 1080p source to 720p out, took 9:30, cpu at about 90% throughout, HD light more off than on. I use a single HD (well, a pair in RAID 1) for both source and output. My GPU is an 2GB ATi 6950.

From this test I'd say a faster gpu would help me but only ever so slightly as my cpu utilisation is already so close to 100%

In your case, if your disk's are not the bottleneck, and I suspect they are not, I'd say a faster gpu is the order of the day. The question is: faster with respect to what? Faster clock speed? More memory bandwidth? More processing cores and if so are we talking rops or mops (I may have made these names up) or texture units or... I'm reminded of BitCoin mining, iirc given an NVIDIA and an ATi card of equal graphical performance, the NVIDIA would always mine faster due to it having more of the processing units required by the BitCoin algorithm.

A quick look on the 'net revealed very little information wrt best video cards for transcoding/rendering... surprisingly little. Rule out the disks and  go buy a couple of faster gpu then make a video to tell the world :)


« Last Edit: April 02, 2013, 11:13:09 am by ecat »
 

Offline mariush

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Re: OT: Video rendering speed in Sony Movie Studio
« Reply #18 on: April 02, 2013, 11:13:42 am »
Dave, there's not much you can do about it, your processor is already too fast for the encoding preset you're using.

If I remember correctly, you're saving the work in Vegas using some CRF preset... that means constant rate factor, as in the quality of the video is constant from frame to frame.

The encoder doesn't spend a lot of time analyzing what happens between frames, what to remove or drop in quality in a way it won't be noticeable with movement,  doesn't try to save bits by overcompressing some darker areas to have more bits for more lively scenes, this and that, psychovisual stuff, it just looks at each picture in the video, computes a quality factor for each small block in the image and then just goes down in quality if you set the CRF lower than the value of the factor computed for that area of the image.

Basically, it has less work to do compared to a normal video encode, where more programming code get involved.

On your old computer, the cores may be pegged to 100% simply due to the fact that the old processor doesn't have so many instructions like SSE3 to optimize the encoding, or simply put that old cpu can't do as many instructions per core as the new one can.

As for your laptop cpu, it's a quad core processor, not an eight core processor.

Hyperthreading makes the processor show 4 more virtual cores and the OS will assign threads to various cores. In your case, core 1 and core 5 are probably the same physical core, and you see those added up are close to 90% cpu usage ... same with core 3 and 7, they're at about 70% ... and core 2 is probably busing decoding the raw video (even though the video card decodes it, the video card driver still uses cpu feeding the card with the data and translating stuff between opencl/cuda and video card) ... so overall you have maybe 6-7 threads already working. It's just that if you're using CRF, simply put there's not much work to be done in the encoding stage.
Hyperthreading isn't full proof, same with the allocation of threads on cores - you may want to experiment with disabling it on your laptop, maybe this way the OS can put the threads more evenly on the cores, making each core work a bit instead of having 2 cores worked up and 2 idle. 


I'd also argue that using the video card of your laptop to help in encoding may be a bad idea. Video cards in laptops generally are kinda slow, they don't have the bandwidth to transfer large chunks of data back and forth. Yes, the hardware video decoder of the video card may be able to decode video faster but the data still has to be copied to the video card then copied back and the video card driver gets involved... you should see if the overall encoding time decreases if you use software decoding.
« Last Edit: April 02, 2013, 11:15:38 am by mariush »
 

Offline EEVblogTopic starter

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Re: OT: Video rendering speed in Sony Movie Studio
« Reply #19 on: April 02, 2013, 11:16:43 am »
A quick look on the 'net revealed very little information wrt best video cards for transcoding/rendering... surprisingly little. Rule out the disks and  go buy a couple of faster gpu then make a video to tell the world :)

Unfortunately you can't do that with a notebook.
 

Offline EEVblogTopic starter

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Re: OT: Video rendering speed in Sony Movie Studio
« Reply #20 on: April 02, 2013, 11:21:40 am »
Dave, there's not much you can do about it, your processor is already too fast for the encoding preset you're using.

If I remember correctly, you're saving the work in Vegas using some CRF preset... that means constant rate factor, as in the quality of the video is constant from frame to frame.

The encoder doesn't spend a lot of time analyzing what happens between frames, what to remove or drop in quality in a way it won't be noticeable with movement,  doesn't try to save bits by overcompressing some darker areas to have more bits for more lively scenes, this and that, psychovisual stuff, it just looks at each picture in the video, computes a quality factor for each small block in the image and then just goes down in quality if you set the CRF lower than the value of the factor computed for that area of the image.

Correct. That's what the 2nd reencoding process using Handbrake is for. And that maxes out all 8 "cores" at near 100% each.

Quote
I'd also argue that using the video card of your laptop to help in encoding may be a bad idea. Video cards in laptops generally are kinda slow, they don't have the bandwidth to transfer large chunks of data back and forth. Yes, the hardware video decoder of the video card may be able to decode video faster but the data still has to be copied to the video card then copied back and the video card driver gets involved... you should see if the overall encoding time decreases if you use software decoding.

The GPU help. I get about a 20% speed improvement with it.
 

Offline ecat

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Re: OT: Video rendering speed in Sony Movie Studio
« Reply #21 on: April 02, 2013, 11:27:18 am »
A quick look on the 'net revealed very little information wrt best video cards for transcoding/rendering... surprisingly little. Rule out the disks and  go buy a couple of faster gpu then make a video to tell the world :)

Unfortunately you can't do that with a notebook.

You can with some notebooks, besides...

Q2) How much rendering speed increase could I expect by moving to a higher spec machine? And what would be the specs of the most reasonable cost machine I could upgrade to improve my rendering speed by say double?

Well, we are one our way to ruling out the need for faster disks or a much faster cpu (though faster cpu is always a plus). 8GB or 16GB looks acceptable, so the question is which gpu is the best match for whatever base system you decide on?

 

Offline EEVblogTopic starter

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Re: OT: Video rendering speed in Sony Movie Studio
« Reply #22 on: April 02, 2013, 11:55:29 am »
Well, we are one our way to ruling out the need for faster disks or a much faster cpu (though faster cpu is always a plus). 8GB or 16GB looks acceptable, so the question is which gpu is the best match for whatever base system you decide on?

Well, I guess the best one I could afford, with the best CPU interconnect.
It would have to be NVIDA, as that has CUDA support in Sony. My current one is ATI, and Sony does support that, but not as well AFAIK.
 

Offline grumpydoc

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Re: OT: Video rendering speed in Sony Movie Studio
« Reply #23 on: April 02, 2013, 11:57:39 am »
Quote
The GPU help. I get about a 20% speed improvement with it.

And lower CPU utilisation :)

At the moment it looks like you need a faster processor and a faster GPU

I don't think upgrading the CPU in your laptop will be worth it if the GPU is the bottleneck - you'll probably end up with a system which isn't much faster, just one which has lower CPU utilisation.

If you go to something like a Ivy Bridge i7 3770 (or K) you will gain a 3.9GHz turbo (vs 2.9) so 35% improvement plus perhaps 10-20% improvement for the architecture so that move should be faster CPU alone than GPU acceleration on your laptop. However only by 10-20% so you might not consider that worthwhile.  If you don't mind overclocking you could probably add another 25% performance and while I could understand why you might not want to overclock it is largely a risk free option with the 3770K and a decent motherboard (another 800MHz to 1GHz turbo should be trivial).

The main benefit of moving to a desktop system is that you can also bring in  a much faster GPU to go with the faster CPU - I don't have any suggestions as graphics cards aren't really my thing (not into gaming and GPU acceleration is still not really available for Linux based video work).
 

Offline Noize

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Re: OT: Video rendering speed in Sony Movie Studio
« Reply #24 on: April 02, 2013, 01:28:04 pm »
This might help. Unparking your cpu.

http://forums.bit-tech.net/showthread.php?t=229080
 


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