Rendering Speed

So I got to thinking today that its amazing at how far all this video stuff has come in the past few years, I mean its just insane how fast the technology changes. I started thinking (during a render of course) that its going to be sick when you can finally get a computer that renders fast enough to not have to wait. But then I realized I dont think it will ever be like that, because just as quickly as computers are increasing their processing power the video industry is coming out with all these new resolutions and codecs that require so much more power that computers will still run slow. Its like a big vicious circle fueled by our need for "more".
The crazy thing is that I wrote this entire post during a render of a short little basic edit on the fastest Mac Pro you can buy... (the computer at my work) I guess even the widest of pipes can be clogged sometimes... (Working with RED raw files doesnt help)

 
well said. the worst part is how much memory high resolution takes up, im working on the cheapest macbook (white one) that you can buy and my harddrive is getting o0owned by the files. one 5minute edit used 30gigs! i obviously deleted all the crap i didn't need and just kept the finished edit in the end but still, my 5 minute edit is 3.99 gigs big
 
Yeah, you think 30gigs is bad for space on a 5 min edit, then you would not believe the space we use. For a 30sec commercial we normally shoot about 200gig of raw footage, then we back that up in a minimum of two places so thats 400gigs, then we convert all the footage from redcode to prores to edit our offline from, that essentially is another 200 gigs, then we do our editing and re-conform back to redcode for color, which normally will add another 50-60 gigs, add in all your exports and compositing and we easily take up to 1tb of space per project, which is such a pain at this point because the biggest raid we have is 18TB and its full, and we have probably 20+TB of storage drives to keep organized on top of that! Ahhh!
 
Yeah it is pretty awesome how much faster computers are now compared to just a little while ago. When I first got into video in 2004, I bought a powermac G5 and had to pay extra for 1gig of ram, which I thought made me hot shit.And I used to take "render walks" when I was done editing. It was a nice way to get a little exercise after sitting on my ass for countless hours.
Haha I remember thinking that if I had a G5 to edit on, and my GL2, I would be set and making awesome stuff. Granted the GL2 isnt/wasn't a bad camera at all for the money, but oh how naive I was.
 
At FLF Films in reno, used to be fall line films back in the day when my boss made snowboard movies, now its all pretty much commercial work, some events and music videos every once in a while too.
 
Pretty sure that 7d footy renders quite quickly on your work computers, haha.
Even HVX stuff in a DVC Pro timeline takes a couple minutes to render on a Mac Pro. I agree though that everything kind of goes hand in hand.
You gotta show me some of that RED footy.
 
You'd be surprised, my macbook pro like the 7D footage more then my work computer! I dont have any of the current stuff we are working on anywhere for you to see, but here is something my boss shot and edited right before I got hired (on RED of course)
http://vimeo.com/7417098
 
On big shoots we rent some stuff, but we have a pretty well equipped camera truck and edit setup so we dont always, like on that he didnt rent anything.
 
Back
Top