How Long Should Rendering take?

How Long Should Rendering Take? I have PSU 11 on an AMD 2X 4600 overclocked to 5400 and am trying to put together my first HD video. It's only 8 minutes long from a Canon HV20. I have three cuts in it, a title and three fades. Nothing fancy. Just trying to learn how to do this and see if I can actually burn something that will be viewed by an HD player as HD. I am not so sure my burners will work for HD but then that's what I'm trying to find out. I am currently saving the rendered file to hard disk (not burning yet) and its been rendering for 12 hours! It does not appear to be locked up, runnung about 20% CPU usage only?

Are you sure there aren't any massive edits or filters in place? Try boosting the process priority (if you can find it: Task Manager/Processes/<the process> right-click/set priority)... And maybe look for some preference in the NLE that lowered rendering priority (background render, maybe?). On an otherwise inactive machine, I'd expect the rendering process to take at least 50% if not more -- even IF background/low-priority.

A straight transcode of a 24min HDV (MPEG2) to Cineform HD Intermediate took my 3.4GHz P4HT around two hours as I recall, using Sony Vegas Movie Studio Platinum. [It is much easier to edit in the intermediate format, though the file is over 20GB for a 5GB HDV] {Don't even ask what converting from HDV to WMV9 HD took}

THEN taking that intermediate into DVD Architect Studio to prepare a basic /standard definition/ DVD took just over three hours to transcode down to SD MPEG2.

Applying something like color correction and unsharp masking on /standard definition/ can extend the time to render a 1 hour video to 6+ hours (most of it is the unsharp masking; color correction just has to "add" a bias to every pixel).


As for the burn... While some BluRay players apparently can recognize AVCHD files appearing on standard DVD media (as, I presume, a data disk -- since I don't know of any video DVD authoring software that doesn't transcode down to 720x480 MPEG2), I'm not sure what the HD DVD players use... I though HD DVD used a directory layout similar to standard DVD, including MPEG2... If so, again you might need an authoring package that will burn 1440/1920x1080 MPEG2 rather than transcode down to 720x480.

This 8 minute video had nothing in it other than three cuts, a title and three simple fades nothing fancy, just trying to learn the software. Well I tried moving up the priority and shut down as much as possible, but after 18 hours it was too much. I stopped the rendering and redid it in SD just to see if I got what I wanted. That took lessthan an hour and burned a disk. It even looked different, because it was displaying the frame number that had been rendered. The HD version did not show that. Unforrtunately, after the first cut, the sound went out on the burned disk. Then after the third cut, it came back!! I checked the edited version and it seemed to have sound throughout so I don't know where I went wrong. Also, I saw something on the Pinnacle website about having to pay another $50 to burn HD?? I thought with the Ultimate package you had everything to burn disks. Don't know if I like this nickle and dime approach. But then, all the other low cost programs seem to have their own issues too.

throughout so I don't know where I went wrong. Also, I saw something on the Pinnacle website about having to pay another $50 to burn HD??


Note that there is a difference between a down-convert from HD to standard definition for burning, and generating an HD video disk.

Though the amount of time you stated for whatever was happening is obscene...

For what it is worth on my 3.2 dual core machine with 2 gig of memory...my results are for a 30 minute AVCHD video it will take about 5 hours to render/burn to disk. So, that is about 50,000 frames at about 10,000 frames per hour.

It was probably a glitch of some sort. I tried to render it in HD again and it went fast. Less than 10 minutes on automatic setting. It even showed the frame number completed. I then treid to burn an HD DVD and again, it did not seen to do anything (right). The pinnacle web site said that Ultimate SHOULD burn an HD DVD so that SHOULD not be the issue. Still, my computer will not recognize it (since it can't read HD DVD but that is a known issue with Windows) and taking the supposedly burned disk to a brick and morter store to check it out on a HD DVD player failed. I see no need on buying an HD DVD player if I can't burn an edited disk yet. It will burn a down converted DVD, but then I could have done that with a lot less investment. Well I am going on vacation later this week and will return with lots of footage. At this point I don't know if I can ever look at it on my HD TV's without going directly out the camera and into the TV on the HCMI line.