Blu Ray authoring time

[Mick Mearman]

Edius 6.03 wants 19 hours to author a Blu ray file, it's already had 7hrs and says it will be another 13hrs the project is 2hr 30min should I convert the whole timeline to HQ first? would that be faster? or am I doing something wrong?
Mick

[John Lewis]

Looking at your signature, Your Pc isnt fast enough

[Red Union Films]

Hi Mick.

It's good practice to make a HQ or HQX master of your project anyway. If you don't make a HQ master or other master codec, the time to encode should not be that different anyway, as Edius looks ahead in the timeline and renders what it needs to ahead of the encode. The time to do this look ahead render would be there abouts the same as doing a master file. So the combined time of a HQ master export and then a BD encode of that file, will be about the same as an un-rendered timeline being exported to BD.

Things just become a little easier and manageable if you start making master files. You can even do batch conversions of multiple master files, something you can't do so easily with individual EZP's/projects.

As for render/export time. Depending on what BD export parameters you are using, this can take some time. With long timelines/masters, it would be quite usual to do at least overnight render/encodes. As a comparison, here are the settings and times for a BD export from a dual quad Mac Pro running at 2.4GHz. 1 minute timeline un-rendered, print to file, h.264/avc, blu-ray, superfine cbr, 3 minutes 47 seconds.

Hope this helps.

Cheers.

Dave.

[John Lewis]

just burned a BDR using Burn to Disc in E6.03. Timeline is 98 minutes comprising 4 imported sequences in 1440*1080i to show menu access to all sequences in a total time of 102 minutes from pressing create disc to disk being ejected The File size was 19.2gb 79%. FCB is enabled, more complex menus take a little longer

[Ron Evans]

As a guide my new i7 2600K took 1 hour and 30 min to export a h264 file for a 2 hour and 23 min timeline. I author in DVD Architect that took 26 mins to create the iso file and IMGBurn took 40 mins to burn the Bluray. Yes, with my old system a Q9450 it would take 12 hours to export the h264 file, I also had a FCB card which would do it a little slower than the i7 2600k so I have now removed the card.

Ron Evans

[Mick Mearman]

just burned a BDR using Burn to Disc in E6.03. Timeline is 98 minutes comprising 4 imported sequences in 1440*1080i to show menu access to all sequences in a total time of 102 minutes from pressing create disc to disk being ejected The File size was 19.2gb 79%. FCB is enabled, more complex menus take a little longer

In that case what should I add to my PC to get better times? or do I need to replace it?
And what is FCB?
Mick

[Ron Evans]

FCB is FirecoderBlu http://www.grassvalley.com/products/firecoder_blu. It is a cell processor based board to accelerate h264 and mpeg encoding. Since I have upgraded to a Sandy Bridge i7 2600K I have taken mine out of the PC as the i7 with Edius 6.03 is faster. Looking at your specs and the equipment you have a PC upgrade is worthwhile for you. You can see my PC specs that is not very expensive, just over $800 to upgrade motherboard, processor, RAM, new 500G hard drive and WIN7 64bit. I started by just upgrading the hardware which is something you may do to save re loading everything. Speed improvement is very real.

Ron Evans

[John Lewis]

In that case what should I add to my PC to get better times? or do I need to replace it?
And what is FCB?
Mick

I would certainly upgrade the PC and look at the I7 options as Ron says Sandybridge is slightly faster than an I7 with FCB so go straight for I7 with sandybridge

[Red Union Films]

In that case what should I add to my PC to get better times? or do I need to replace it?
And what is FCB?
Mick

Hi Mick.

Unless you are making proper money commercially, don't bother. You can always find something that needs upgrading or expanding on, but do you really need to? Your system sounds fine for general editing with Edius. If you are going to spend most of your time encoding then maybe upgrade, but if it's only something that you do at the end of an edit, then maybe save your money for something better.

Looking at what people edit with, I have never seen anything on the forum that's better or more powerful than what I use for Edius. Could I do with something faster? Absolutely! Would it be worth it? Probably not. There is always going to be something that you could improve, but you need to weigh up what is best for what you need at any given time.

The likes of Ron, do a lot of encoding and delivery stuff. So having the type of system he does, is a real must. If you do anything like the quality or frequency of work and delivery that he does, then fill your boots. But if your needs and outputs are less demanding, then save your money for something that would give more of a significant boost to your productions or workflow.

Cheers.

Dave.

[dpalomaki]

Unless you are making proper money commercially, don't bother.

Bottom line, if editing profesionally run a business case. If the time saved is worth more than the cost of the upgrade then upgrade, otherwise delay upgrades until it is worth it. Gear gets faster and cost tend to dropover time. If you can bill at $100 per hour and the upgrade will ultimately give you 8 additional hours you can bill elsewhere within a reasonable period of time (say a year) it may well be worth a $800 upgrade. Don't forget to factor in the it takes to implement the upgrade that you could otheerwise be billing instead of working the upgrade.

Keep in mind that if Liquid is still important to you, a move from XP to Win 7 might cause issues with it.

However, if your editing has a significant hobby aspect to it than do what makes you happy. A newer, faster, machine is almost always always nice - unless you find use of an old, slow machine gives bragging rights you value.

[Ron Evans]

I agree with Dav'e comments. With SD for me there was no real need to do much as I was happy. When I moved to all cameras being HD and then downconverting to get SD DVD time started to be a problem. But with long Bluray files in h264 the time became to much for me even as a rather obsessive retirement hobby !!! All my projects are theatre so end up being around 2 hours or more so even the saving on encode times for SD are worth it. If your videos are short it may not be worth worrying but the speed is sure nice and in comparison to the cost of the video cameras etc then the PC cost is not that much.

Ron Evans