RT2500 compiling from single frames

[Raptor^]

I'm looking for a video editing solution to replace an ageing Mac where I work, please bear with me, video editing isn't really my field.

We create individual frames on our render farm as .tga files and then compile them on the Mac into its native format before editing and laying down to video.

Today I took a 100 frame animation and a 500 frame animation down to a local computer store to try the same process using an RT2500. The editing and laying down part worked great, but I had a huge performance problem with compiling the individual frames.

I tried the 100 frame animation first, it compiled the first 50 frames nice and fast, but the second 50 took an age. The HDD went absolutely berserk. I didn't bother with the 500 frame animation after that, it would simply have taken too long.

I guess this is more of a system setup issue. The system was pretty ropey, running Windows ME, 256Mb RAM, some unknown 7200 RPM IDE disk as the editing drive, Athlon based (exact speed unknown), but its a demo machine in a store so I can't exactly mess with it too much! Having said that, I would like to try and get best performance I can in the situation I'm in, we are only a small company and cannot afford to shell out for something that might not work as intended, cheap as it may be. Can someone tell me what settings will give me the best results in Premiere for this sort of situation? Also, does anyone else do this sort of work, what system specs are you running on and what sort of performance do you get?

Any machine we buy will be running Win2k and will have at lest 512Mb RAM, if that would help the situation.

I had another problem too, the frames I took with me are 768x576, but the PAL setting on the RT2500 was 720x576, so every single frame had to be resized, I guess this added to the problem but I really don't know.

I'm going back to the store tomorrow with some correct size frames to see if that helps, any other tips would be great too.

The people here claim that 768x576 is standard full PAL res, and I can't see why the RT2500 would use a different size.... who is right??

[Dr Mordrid]

Both are "right".

The RT-2000/2500 use DV and MPEG-2 (which is most often used for DVD authoring). Both of these formats use a standardized 720x480/576 (NTSC/PAL) frame size and the RT-2000/2500 are designed to use those settings. By standardized I mean LOCKED IN. PERIOD.

As such any imported bitmap sequences, animations or video should be generated with this in mind for best results and speed.

Your 768x576 sequences are also legal PAL analog formats, but are NOT "legal" for DV or DVD. As such Premiere is going to have to crunch a lot to resize them one frame at a time. This is disk, CPU and RAM intensive and not to be attempted on minimal systems.

If the system you're trying this on is not optimized with LOTS of room both on the boot and video disk AND plenty of system RAM it could easily bring Premiere down. 256 megs is the bare minium for the old RT-2x00 drivers. With the new RT-2x00 drivers it's insufficient as they need 384-512 megs.

Also, popular as it may be with some, even Premiere6 can be twitchy when pushed, especially on an underpowered system. If this system is older and using Premiere 5.1c then all bets are off. That was one buggy puppy.

Win2K would help a lot, but a fully RT-2x00 optimized system with the latest drivers would help more.

Dr. Mordrid

[Raptor^]

Thanks a lot for the help and explanation, I've resized a load of frames in Photoshop and I'll take them along some point this morning to have another go, with renewed confidence it might actually work.

The system is new enough to have Premiere 6, but I don't know which version of the RT2500 drivers its running.

[Raptor^]

Hmm that didn't really help. It now speeds through the first 55 frames really quickly, but still grinds to a halt after that.

I guess the system is just short on memory and decently performing disks, but until I can prove the card works I can't go and build a system around it. Guess I'm out of luck for the time being.

I noticed that this machine had 180Mb RAM allocated immediately after reboot. Is that an effect of the RT2500 drivers, or is it something I could look into reducing to improve performance? I couldn't see anything huge running, but without a decent task manager its difficult to tell.

[Dr Mordrid]

If it's running Win9x or ME it's probably a side effect of the Windows VCACHE, a virtual disk cache.

The problem with VCACHE is that it eats up to 80% of the free physical RAM in the system on bootup for disk caches and is very reluctant to give it back to the system for use by programs. This causes large programs to run off the swapfile....slowly. It can also cause other problems related to stability with said large programs, especially if they are doing things graphic as these are very memory and CPU intensive.

One of the better ways to mitigate this is to use a utility called "Cacheman" to restrict VCACHES activities. It can also force the unloading of unused *.dll's as well as several other OS and filesystem opimizations related that help multimedia and gaming systems.

http://www.outertech.com/news.php?news=12&PHPSESSID=a38eb61f060c51222c55e863343fa539

Once Cacheman is running start the Disk Cache Wizard and it'll take you through some questions. Most all quite obvious.

Another thing that can mess things up is the placing of temporary files on the boot disk. If left there they can fill the disk and cause the swapfile not to be able to grow. This can and will cause an out of memory situation. To prevent this Premiere should be set up to place them on the video drive instead. Some folks neglect to do this when setting up their RT-2x00 cards.

One other Premiere-ism is that it's lousy at managing its undo levels use of memory, especially in systems with marginal amounts of RAM. Often these caches too will fill up and bog down the system. This should be set to a value <3.

Dr. Mordrid

[Raptor^]

I'm not sure its vcache, my home machine that dual boots 98 and 2k doesn't show a vast memory usage on bootup.

Anyway, I can't go installing software on this demo machine anyway.

The good news is that I might be able to get a card on sale/return, I'll stick that in my work box (dual 800, 1Gb RAM) and see how it goes.

Using a copy of Premiere 5.1c I have here at work, I compiled the same 500 frames to an uncompressed AVI in software just to see how long it took. It completed in about 6 mins, despite a huge lack of disk space on my machine right now. Our Mac takes about 15 to do the same, so if I can compile to DV in the same or less time using the RT2500, thats ok.

[Dr Mordrid]

Sounds like a config issue, but the VCACHE is an issue so don't ignore it.

The 2500 will come with Premiere6 full and the new 3.0 mega pack drivers. After you get it you may want to install the Service Pack for 3.0 as well.

Dr. Mordrid

[Raptor^]

Thanks a lot for the help, I'll let you know how I get on with the card in a better specc'ed machine here.