Why does MEP 2013+ take longer to render a Blu-Ray & AVCHD media than MEP18+ used to?

mojoaudioguru wrote on 4/23/2013, 12:58 AM

I have to use MEP 18+ to render Blu-Rays or AVCHD discs with projects created with MEP 2013+, because it takes MEP 2013+ twice as long, or longer. Is there a setting that has to be enabled on MEP 2013+ that I don't know about? It took MEP 2013+ 9.5 hours to render a Blu-ray of 1.5 hours of edited footage. Yet, it took MEP 18+ only 2.5 hours for the same exact project. My desktop is Windows 7, with a Q9550 - Core 2 Quad, (Overclocked @ 3.3 GHz - liquid cooled), with 10 gig of DDR2 RAM, on an SSD, (Using 10 gig for pagefile), drive, and employing an NVidia GTX 460 with 336 cuda cores. Have used this same set-up for MEP 18+ without issues. But the first project that I tried to render a Blu-Ray / AVCHD disc on MEP 2013+, told me it would take 17 hours to render! I have rendered DVDs on MEP 2013+ without any issues. (In fact, I thought it was even faster than MEP 18+) But any high definition BDRs or AVCHD BDRs take forever. Did I not do something correctly? Has anyone else experienced this? Or has anyone figured out a solution? Any help would be appreciated. Thanks.

Comments

Scenestealer wrote on 4/23/2013, 6:10 PM

This is not typical of MEP2013. It should be faster if anything to create an AVCHD H264 file. I have not created a Bluray disc through the Burn window but this should not be different if you have chosen an AVCHD MPEG4 profile (the same as your original footage?).

What format is your original footage.

Did you use Cuda acceleration in both programs.

Are you using the same project (MVP) created in MEP18 to test MEP2013 as this can sometimes create problems.

Are you using an unmodified MEP default profile for the Burn / encode phase.

Try setting your "program settings to defaults" in the "File" menu.

My setup is almost identical to yours except for your memory - 4GB plus 7GB pagefile on a separate HDD - and Vista32 OS.

A little off the topic but I am very interested as to whether you have noticed a big improvement to MEP's overall performance as a result of putting your pagefile on the SSD. I have often thought of getting a small one just to use as a fast pagefile instead of the separate HDD. MEP is quite pagefile intensive, apparently especially when rendering.

mojoaudioguru wrote on 4/24/2013, 12:33 AM

Thank you for your quick response. The original format is AVCHD. (Panasonic HMC series cameras)

I've always used the Cuda cores for acceleration. (it works fine for MEP18+, but does nothing for MEP2013+)

The project was created using MEP2013+ When I realized it would take 3 times longer to render, I rendered it

with MEP18+, instead.

I've never modified the burn / encode parameters.

I tried the 'Program Defaults' and still the same.

Actually, I failed to mention that I have a 64 bit OS. (As opposed to your 32 bit)

YES! Big improvement going to an SSD. I put in a 64 gig SSD just for the OS, (W7), and MAGIX programs. Everything else is on an internal SATA 2.5 TB HDD. That wound up speeding everything up! No more stalling while editing up to 5 AVCHD camera footage! No more stalling during transitions, or color correction. I have 10 gig of DDR2 memory, but decided to also use 10 gig on the SSD for pagefile, and my computer runs like a rapped ape!

That's why I don't understand why MEP2013+ takes so long to render on High Def projects. MEP18+ runs like a charm. From what I read about MEP2013+, it's supposed to be even faster. On DVDs it is, but not on Blu-Rays or AVCHD discs. In fact, I have yet to render one on MEP2013+ because when I got up one morning, it had been rendering for 9 hours, and said it still had 8 more hours to go. So, I stopped it, rendered it with MEP18+, in just 2.5 hours! I need to clear this up.

My advice to you is to get a 64 gig SSD, install your OS and just your Magix programs onto it, put everything else on another HDD, then assign 7 gig to it as your page file, along with your 4 gig of memory, and your results will be night and day. Please keep in mind that mine is 64 bit, and I have 10 gig of RAM. Could make a slight difference. Not to mention the GTX460 GPU. (And that I have my Q9550 Core2 Quad, overclocked at 3.3 GHz with a liquid cooled processor radiator system)

I hope someone can tell me what is going on. Thank you once again for your help, Scenestealer. ;)

Scenestealer wrote on 4/24/2013, 6:55 AM

Maybe have a look at this previous post and answers:- http://www.magix.info/us/why-does-it-take-so-long-to-generate-a.knowledge.647811.html?sort=newest&page=2

The answer may be that you are starting with MPEG4 files and attempting to encode them to MPEG2 which would require much more transcoding. Check that the Bluray burn window in MEP2013 has MPEG4 selected not MPEG2. This may be set differently in MEP18 MX. Another pointer to this is that Cuda is inactive in 2013 which would figure as CUDA can only be used to accelerate MPEG4 H264 AVCHD encoding.

Thanks for the tips on the SSD. There is a school of thought that says it is best not to have the swapfile on the C: drive if it is an SSD as the large amount of reading and writing could shorten its' life. Part of the reason I think I might like to dedicate it to a swap file so that if it fails I do not lose everything. Also other members seem to think there is little benefit to MEP's performance from having the program on the SSD / C drive so I am wondering if most of your improved performance comes from the pagefile having much quicker access.

My GPU is the same as yours as is my processor and OC at 3.4Ghz, although with stock cooling. As for the 64bit OS - I am sure this is some benefit but bear in mind that MEP is only a 32Bit program with some optimisations for 64bit memory usage so probably does not get the advantage of the additional RAM that you may think. I believe Magix utilize the pagefile a lot as a cache to make up for the limited RAM access but that's just my theory.....

Cheers

mojoaudioguru wrote on 5/7/2013, 1:41 AM

I figured out what the problem was. Simple, really. I had assigned some of the system software folders to the internal SATA HDD, instead of on the SSD drive. After correcting my blunder, I retried rendering that Blu-Ray, and it rendered almost 24 minutes faster than MEP18+.

Pretty impressive. I do understand the point regarding 32 bit & 64 bit, but MEP 2013+ runs extremely fast, regardless, on my computer. I'm not too concerned about the pagefile being on the C drive. Because of the 32bit MEP '13 sofware, it never gets used anyway, due to the 10 gig of actual DDR2 RAM. But it's there, just in case. On a side note, I've tried to overclock my processor to 3.4 and above, but it always gets unstable. The best I can do is 3.3. Is there a formula that you can recommend to get it to speed up without shutting down. Although, I do think the computer is fast enough already. In any case, I appreciate the assistance. Thank you.

Scenestealer wrote on 5/7/2013, 2:25 AM

Glad you got the rendering problem worked out.

Are you sure that the pagefile is not being used? How did you come to this conclusion - was it just by looking at the Hard fault graph in the resource monitor? This can be indicating no paging but the "Disk" section can be showing a lot of writing to the Pagefile.sys file. Does the pagefile usage / allocation change in the Performance Tab of Task manager when MEP is running and rendering?

As far as the overclocking goes - I am no expert on this but I think I just increased the Front Side Bus frequency and left everything else on the Default or Auto. I think increasing the RAM frequency crashes the thing, and with that set on Auto, what would normally be an increase in RAM frequency as a product of increasing the FSB Frequency, is automatically adjusted back down to keep RAM frequency near stock levels.

I do not know how much further I could have increased the FSB speed because I was seeing too much temperature increase on the processor to go any higher with the stock fan.

johnebaker wrote on 5/7/2013, 1:41 PM

SS said - Are you sure that the pagefile is not being used?

If you are using Windows and have not set the page file size to zero, then you are using the page file. For more on pageing read this article

I am looking at ways to speed up rendering and the most promising in theory and from what I have read, is to use a dedicated SSD drive for the Windows pagefile only.

The system I will be looking at as soon as I get a SSD drive will be OS and software on normal hard drive, data on a second internal hard drive and a small SSD for the pagefile.

This has the advantage that, because SSD drives tend to fail catastrophically, ie they do not degrade like hard drives do, a failure is of little consequence - the only loss is the pagefile. OS, software and data are still on the HDD's.

John

Scenestealer wrote on 5/8/2013, 5:50 PM

Hi John

Thanks for the link to the article - good old Wiki.

I am thinking on the same lines as you and what I was trying to determine from the OP's experience is whether the gains come more from the fact that the Pagefile is on a drive with fast I/O rather than the gain being from the OS and program being there.

Some of the German Experts with SSD's have expressed their belief that there is not much benefit from having an SSD for VDL / MEP but I am not sure how they have their systems configured in respect to the pagefile and RAM and where they have the respective project files and data etc. It would seem to fit into apoint you made a while back that there is not much activity on C: untill the project is saved or the program closed - pesumably because the program is loaded into RAM while it is open and everything takes place there or is paged in and out.

I have not fully comprehended that Wiki article but it made a mention of a page "cache" and wonder if that is the cache that Magix used to refer to and allow you to select or not. That option is no longer selectable but I am sure it is still used in 2013.

Peter