Procoder Express Mpeg2 rendering taking hours! any tips?

[motodop]

Hi,
I have 90 minute video in Premier 6.2 and I am coding it to Mpeg2 via the Procoder Express plug in.
Its is taking about 8 hours! Is this right.?

I'm not doing anything fancy. Used the Wizard and changed coding to VBR1 and I’m getting about a frame a minute. The video is your 'standard' doco. Looks of titles, imported photos, video FX on photos, all rendered with the project before export.

I have a desktop running W2K on a P4, 3 separate drives (1 specifically for Video), 512 memory.
I don’t understand the slow speed.

Any clues from experienced heads would be appreciated. Thanks, Moto

[tinker]

I do not think this is unreasonable.
I use TMPGEnc X and it takes anywhere from 6-12 hours for 2 hour video, depends if I use any filters.
I have WinXP,P4-3.0GHz, 2Gb memory and 7200 rpm drives.
Let it run overnight.

[motodop]

Really?
Just for clarification i am encoding around 8000 and i though VBR 1 would cut down on some time (as opposed to VBR2)
Quality is important but the original footage was shot on a TRV900 and its not state of the art.
Most of the posts i see say that Procoder is 'generally' faster than the others.
Thanks for the reply

[FulciLives]

You often gain speed if you have two physical hard drives and you keep the source on one of them and designate the other for the destination. The idea is it reads from one HDD and writes to the other HDD which is faster than reading and writing to a single HDD. Please note it needs to be two separate hard drives ... one hard drive split into two or more partitions will probably not gain much if any speed.

Also since you used such a high video bitrate (8000kbps) you should have just done a CBR encode.

- John "FulciLives" Coleman

[motodop]

Thanks for the tips.
I have 2 separate hard drives so will try that tomorrow.
It takes about 8 hours to encode the project I have now and unfortunately today after encoding the file, it was not in 1 single Mpeg, plus separate audio, but in 3 parts (3 video and 3 audio)
It’s never ending trying to get this right!
If you know why I might end up with separate files (1.55 GB, 1.55 GB and 561mb) please let me know your ideas.
Thanks again,
Moto

[Soopafresh]

If you're rendering with the hardware you have posted, I'm impressed it only takes 8 hours. 512MB and an Athlon XP1800 isn't enough for your ambitions. Minimally, you should double the amount of RAM.

[FulciLives]

You think 8 hours is painfull LOL

I used to run TMPGEnc Plus on a WinXP install that was on a Pentium 3 650Mhz with 256MB RAM. A two pass VBR encode would take anywhere from 36 to 48 hours!

So yeah I guess Soopafresh's comments about hardware make some sense. You want faster times? You need to upgrade to a better, faster CPU etc.

- John "FulciLives" Coleman

[motodop]

moved

[motodop]

Solved!
Thanks for all your help.
The problem was the Procoder Express plug via Premiere 6.1 was, and is not, functioning as it should. As soon as i saved my Premiere as a .wav and then used Procoder Express as a standalone i was getting a much better speed 0.33x realtime down to 0.29 x realtime and my 90 minute project was being coded VBR (2 pass) in 5 hours. Still slow but considering my 512 RAM i think very acceptable. I am very impressed with the quality of Proceoder Express from 3CCD TRV900 footage. bitrate was in the mid 6000 max 8000.
Moto