typically slow rendering jobs

[sneakyimp]

Hi:

I'm more a programmer/hardware guy than a video editor and was hoping I could bring my limited skills to bear on rendering bottlenecks. I was reading this awesome thread on hard drive speeds which I found quite useful:
http://www.reduser.net/forum/showthread.php?t=27604

It's very interesting to note that Redcode RAW has pretty low disk requirements (either 28 Megabytes/sec or 36 Megabytes/sec according to wikipedia). However, laboprod points out that when you are rendering using RedCine, you sometimes need much higher disk throughput (ca. 200 Megabytes/sec). I also understand that decoding redcode is very processor intensive and that the new nehalem CPUs (with their superior chip-to-memory bandwidth) really speed things up.

I was wondering what time-consuming rendering jobs people do where they find themselves waiting. I'm curious about both the annoying computer-bogs-down-while-i'm-editing stuff and also the gosh-we-have-to-go-home-now-this-will-take-eighteen-hours stuff. Any and all anecdotes, system specs, and data are welcome here. The goal is to chase down the bottlenecks and also to understand what the slowest and most irritating rendering jobs are.

[Antoine Baumann]

in my experience:

first to get an "editable format/codec" out of redcine/redline is not long. Just put the lowest quality debayer and choose a qt codec with sd resolution or 720p and it will be close to RT, like a tape workflow. Only this your offline, so you will need conform tool.
When the edl comes back from the editor, then it will likely takes way more time to render out the dpx or other pro res hq because you will likely choose the highest quality debayer or the mid quality (for tv it is normaly ok).
Considering you have about 1:20 ratio with an octocore (i wrote once you can get 1:10 ratio, but it finally seems i was quite wrong) with the highest quality debayer. If you have 150 min to render out it will takes 50 hours. Depending on the rush you are in, you will need more than one computer.

I really don't know about bottlenecks. But may be a 64bit version of redcine along with a linux version and more powerfull cpu and gpu that are even more efficenctly used that actually. And of course the finishing of the sdk and open the debayering process to third pary.

cheers,
antoine.

[sneakyimp]

The jargon you use is a bit unfamiliar to me (dpx?). If you could clarify, I'd be grateful.

Just out of curiosity, how many Gigabytes of files are we dealing with. The EDL is just a small file...how many source files (and how large in aggregate) and then how large is the output file (or files)?

[I Bloom]

DPX is an uncompressed image format. It is often used as an intermediate format in film post production because it's relatively small for uncompressed and easy to control.

IBloom