Overman's Moviestorm Render Workflow

The uncompressed files are huge, and it's not uncommon to go above that 4gb mark; NTFS is definitely required if you're going to go there. Was covered in another thread here, I believe.

I am already aware that, in its current state, Moviestorm does not spit out uncompressed video. I prefer to work with an uncompressed master, however, because I can have full PCM wav quality in the soundtrack, and because it recompresses faster when it's time to make the "versions". (I never use Moviestorm's audio output for anything other than a reference guide).

If you have your master compressed, then every subsequent render you perform will first decompress that codec and then recompress to the other. So if you're starting with compressed source footage, there will always be at least ONE decompress step and ONE recompress step. Even if you have Vegas handle it all, those steps are still going on, it is unavoidable. I just prefer to separate them because it fits better for my workflow, but it's precisely the same number of decompress/recompress steps.

You don't HAVE to have a master, it's just what I prefer to do, because I end up rendering to a lot of different formats for a lot of different purposes. If you don't need one, then don't do one, just render straight out of your NLE, it really just comes down to preference, not one or the other being a superior method.

Overman wrote:

gishzida wrote:

What kind of render times are you getting from your system?

Great question, I haven't yet timed it. I've got some renders I'll be doing tomorrow, I'll plan on clocking them and get back to you.

Okay, just got finished timing one.

1280x720. Full-sized outdoor set, lots of props (houses, trees / bushes, cars, some furniture, etc.), three characters, multiple cameras, some moving some still, about 10 distinct shots.

2232 frames rendered in 4 minutes 20 seconds. So about 8-9 frames per second on average.

Overman wrote:

Okay, just got finished timing one.

1280x720. Full-sized outdoor set, lots of props (houses, trees / bushes, cars, some furniture, etc.), three characters, multiple cameras, some moving some still, about 10 distinct shots.

2232 frames rendered in 4 minutes 20 seconds. So about 8-9 frames per second on average.

Yikes! that's about 8 times faster than my P4 2.6 gHz... where the average scene was about the same 2000 to 2200 frames.

On the topic of Compress decompress:

I'm using a wav audio master [PCM 44.1 khz] mastered in Sound Forge which was rendered originally in Acid Pro [for music] for the sound tracks but given that the fastest rate for video is a compressed a 1.5 mbps stream with MovieStorm, there is no real advantage to creating an uncompressed video render.

This isn't analog audio where "oversampling" can make a difference. Efffectively all you end up doing is creating a really big file that contains a lot of extra frames that do not add to the video quality.

Given that 176.4 KBytes / second is the actual sampling rate for 44.1 khz 16 bit audio [about 10.1 Mb per minute] and the frame rate for for MS's MPEG output is 196 Kbytes / second you should lose no audio when you edit and render back to the same format... or if you are concerened about the audio being compressed add the sample sizes together [372 Kbps-- call it 22 or so Mb a minute] and the file size is actually much more manageable....

The video / audio output ultimately be only as good as the slowest rate used in all the files used.

gishzida wrote:

...but given that the fastest rate for video is a compressed a 1.5 mbps stream with MovieStorm, there is no real advantage to creating an uncompressed video render.

The sole advantage for me, while Moviestorm's source is still compressed, is the speed of dealing with an uncompressed file when generating multiple versions. It is in some cases slightly faster, in others ridiculously faster. Experiment for yourself, you will see.

Once Moviestorm offers uncompressed source video, the advantages multiply. For now, the speed is enough reason for me; once I took spatial considerations out of the equation, my limited time became my most precious commodity. So it's worth a little "wasted" disk space, which comes a lot cheaper than time lately.

Eeep!

The problem I'm dealing with is that it's a P4 system and the "large Drive" is a 500 gB external USB device formatted to FAT32... I'd move the contents elsewhere and format it NTFS but I don't have enough space available to move everything,,, As it is I just had to Clone my main drive from an 80 gB drive to a 120 gB drive...

As for render times:

As you may have seen I've put up a rough cut of my first "music video". Not a grand affair by any means. Using it, the PAL DV 720 x 576 25 Frame rate [9050 frames] [1.441 Mbps stream] uncompressed audio, took about 22 minutes about 6.8 frames a second.

The updated version, a 640 x 480 QT MPEG4 mov file [15 Frame] took about 20 minutes from the same Vegas project file -- I rendered it out of the project file as a "new master"....

BTW thanks for the reminder why extracting audio from the raw MS AVIs is required. I had not done it in the first render and it was pretty obvious the spoken words and the audio track where not where they needed to be... though it might be used to pretty funny effect if one were "simulating" a Hong Kong Action film.

joel

Quick note - this is very similar to the workflow we used for BloodSpell, with one difference: I tend to export from Final Cut Pro (in our case) at native resolution, just as Overman does, but then I perform any resizes needed using VirtualDub's (www.virtualdub.org) resize filters using the Lacroz3 method, which seems to produce the best resize quality of anything I've tried.

Normally this doesn't mean yet another intermediate step. If you're running a DivX, you can do that directly through VDub, and if you're producing Flash you can run straight from a VirtualDub frameserver - it's only if you're using Quicktime that it'll not recognise VirtualDub's frameserving and you'll have to run off a new uncompressed version at the target resolution.

(WTF is a frameserver? It's a little program that runs a live edit on a piece of video and then "pretends" that the converted video is a file on your system somewhere - great time and space saver. See http://www.virtualdub.org/docs_frameserver.html)

(Note that FFMPEG WILL read the VDub frameserver - so you can convert to H.264 using a tool like Super, if you prefer)

BTW - when we say "uncompressed", my usual codec is HuffYUV - mathmatically lossless and about 1/4 the size of raw uncompressed video. Sadly, Quicktime won't read that, so you'll need to convert via raw uncompressed video if you ever need to go through Quicktime Pro.

gishzida wrote:

The problem I'm dealing with is that it's a P4 system and the "large Drive" is a 500 gB external USB device formatted to FAT32... I'd move the contents elsewhere and format it NTFS but I don't have enough space available to move everything,,, As it is I just had to Clone my main drive from an 80 gB drive to a 120 gB drive...

Unless there's a restriction to working with external USB drivers I'm not aware of, you can convert any FAT-32 partition/drive to NTFS using Control Panel/Administrative Tools/Computer Management/Drive Management. Just Google "convert fat32 to ntfs" and you'll get lots of guidance.

And none of these procedures necessitate moving data. Just do a back-up first if you want to feel safe.

RiViT wrote:

Unless there's a restriction to working with external USB drivers I'm not aware of, you can convert any FAT-32 partition/drive to NTFS using Control Panel/Administrative Tools/Computer Management/Drive Management. Just Google "convert fat32 to ntfs" and you'll get lots of guidance.

And none of these procedures necessitate moving data. Just do a back-up first if you want to feel safe.

I had thought that Fat32 conversion was in Computer Management > Disk Management too but it seems that Microsoft, in its wisdom, has removed that functionality from the Disk Management snap-in...

so its back to the command line. Doing a de-frag first to get files arranged along proper cluster boundaries...

gishzida wrote:

so its back to the command line. Doing a de-frag first to get files arranged along proper cluster boundaries...

In Vista (or XP), you can use the "CONVERT" command-line utility to transform an existing drive.

Try convert /? for options.

(Of course reiterating that a backup first is the safest approach)

Yes WinXP has the same utility... They removed the convert code from Disk Management with the release of Win2K because after all nobody needs FAT32 except portable devices that might get connected to that other operating system that a certain California Computer and Entertainment Appliance company sells... So what better way to prevent interoperability than to force users to use NTFS.... Because after all Redmond knows best...

but I do this kinda stuff for a living [I maintain a 60 some odd mixed server network] I'm naturally doing it without the safety net...

Had to dismount the drive but otherwise all is well: Conversion complete... and patches are now loading to MS...

Now completed and loading my movie...

So that much is done... now all I need to do is clean up the scenes and re-render everything then pull it into Vegas and try the Raw Render.

Got a render time for an uncompressed version of "Imaginary Skies" : about 24:10 minutes on a P4 with 2 Gb for a 6:02 minute movie.... which makes for

Render time = 4 X [Length of Movie]

With the times you posted it proves "More Cores Is Better! [tm]"

The final files size [using Sony's YUV] was 15.6 Gb... Yikes!

What was that compression codec for lossless?

Still working on a third edit hope to have that done this week-end and begin the framing for my "Xmas Gift"

joel

Thanks so much for this thread. It's been very helpful as I try to get my hands around this process and the flood of formats and codecs that I'm swimming in.

Since it seems as if quite of you use Sony Vegas, I decided to get the trial version of it. Once I got it installed, cracked it open, and saw how much more professional it looked compared to Movie Maker, I got excited.

25 minutes later and I still can't get it to recognize the direct renders from MS. Trying to open them gets me a "Stream attributes could not be determined". However, VMS will read the Movie Maker version of those files.

Is there a codec that I need to get VMS to read MS's .avi files?

Edit: Yes, I'm checking the VMS forums and am coming up with "nada" so far.

The K-Lite Codec Pack seems to do the trick:

http://www.codecguide.com/download_kl.htm

I'd like to nominate Overman to receive the 5,000 MS Points Award for this thread.

Also, I'd like to second that nomination.