How do I speed up render time?

[rat]

I'm tired of waiting 6 hours for a 5 minute video. Anyway to speed up render time?

[Detonatress]

Originally posted by TechnoPwnda:

I'm tired of waiting 6 hours for a 5 minute video. Anyway to speed up render time?

By either sacrificing quality or increasing your computer's specs / getting a better computer.
6 hours for a 5 minute video would be wonderful for me. I have to wait around 3 hours for a few seconds of video... although I use 512 DoF with 64 Motion Blur.

You can reduce quality to 64 DoF and 64 MB but some minor things could be noticeable, such as ambient occlusion grains or poor aperture blurring (it shows doubled stuff instead of that cool blur)

[Pte Jack]

Decrease resolution from 1080P to 270P, Decrease Motion Blur and DOF from what you've set it to back to default or lower, Kill ALL animation from your clip and decrease the number of models in the shots from what you have now to 0 and change your format from mp4 to avi.

In other words, your render settings and all the parts in your clip that are mentioned above determine the the render time needed to render your movie. Really, the only thing you can do to speed things up are to adjust those setting to the minimum you're willing to put up with, the higher the quality, the longer the render.

There are 2 other things you can also do,

1)Render your clips as Image Sequence pictures and use a 3rd party alternative like virtual dub or Blender to patch the frames and audio created back together as a movie file

AND

2) Buy a higher end Video Card (If you're not rending on a laptop).

[EmperorFaiz.wav]

Tell me, is rendering as image sequences much faster/better that video file?

[Zappy]

Originally posted by EmperorFaiz.txt:

Tell me, is rendering as image sequences much faster/better that video file?

Both. Uncompressed (in PNG at least), thus better quality and also less rendering time, as it doesn't have to spend time compressing stuff.

[EmperorFaiz.wav]

Good to know!

[Pte Jack]

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=375229570 I think I save over 5 hours start to finish doing this...

[raptornx01]

I honestly have never noticed any significant different in render times by doing IS over an mp4. and quality i've only noticed with volumetric lights against black backgrounds. Brightly lit scene look about the same (in terms of image quality. there are difference in color saturation between mpeg and h.264 tho, but that is more of a stylistic thing, then a quality one)

[Pte Jack]

SFM is a 32bit program, it maxes memory use at 3 gigs, throwing more ram at your computer is not going to help. CPU speed does help a bit, by even throwing 1 or 2 dedicated cores at it doesn't increase render time substantially. It's best just to let windows sort that mess out.

As I stated before, the only real way to increase render time is to lower your render settings or with a higher end GPU that has more memory that SFM can draw on (if it can, not sure, I only have 1 gig GPUs) or to render image sequences and use a 3rd party program to splice the images and audio back together.

@raptorn, One big Time saving is the fact that as the images are being produced, you can trap bad takes and errors in real time instead of waiting for a MP4 to finish and finding it glitched after 32 hours of rendering. Depending on the Render Settings, TGA and PNGs files do produce faster than video. It might not be much faster if using high settings, but they are. Personally, I find that an image sequence production is actually sharper in quality than a H.264 compressed MP4. But that's a personal observation from a colour blind old fart who wears glasses when not staring at a computer screen...

[Detonatress]

Actually it is going to help: suppose you're stuck with 4 GB RAM.
Windows will use your RAM, some security programs (I run Comodo) will use your RAM although you can disconnect the internet and turn off the security program, maybe an open browser will use your RAM, and SFM at its tops will need 3 GB all to itself to run at peak efficiency.

Yeah, it can use the same 4 GB for all of that but wouldn't it be better to have 6 or 8 GB with a part of it dedicated to the other background programs (especially Windows itself) and 3 GB fully dedicated to SFM so that it can run at peak efficiency?

[miku]

Originally posted by Detonatress:

Actually it is going to help: suppose you're stuck with 4 GB RAM.
Windows will use your RAM, some security programs (I run Comodo) will use your RAM although you can disconnect the internet and turn off the security program, maybe an open browser will use your RAM, and SFM at its tops will need 3 GB all to itself to run at peak efficiency.

Yeah, it can use the same 4 GB for all of that but wouldn't it be better to have 6 or 8 GB with a part of it dedicated to the other background programs (especially Windows itself) and 3 GB fully dedicated to SFM so that it can run at peak efficiency?

SFM is "still" a Beta. That's why it's not perfect with every PC. I hate it! Don't get me wrong here, but SFM is so old and Valve could spend a little bit of time in making the performance of the SFM better.

[Detonatress]

Originally posted by SIRTANKA:

Originally posted by Detonatress:

Actually it is going to help: suppose you're stuck with 4 GB RAM.
Windows will use your RAM, some security programs (I run Comodo) will use your RAM although you can disconnect the internet and turn off the security program, maybe an open browser will use your RAM, and SFM at its tops will need 3 GB all to itself to run at peak efficiency.

Yeah, it can use the same 4 GB for all of that but wouldn't it be better to have 6 or 8 GB with a part of it dedicated to the other background programs (especially Windows itself) and 3 GB fully dedicated to SFM so that it can run at peak efficiency?

SFM is "still" a Beta. That's why it's not perfect with every PC. I hate it! Don't get me wrong here, but SFM is so old and Valve could spend a little bit of time in making the performance of the SFM better.

This SFM is probably not going to be out of BETA anyway. They've made a 64 bit one, which you can only access if you download the whole freaking Dota 2 + Dota 2 Reborn, to get Source 2 Filmmaker which makes use of multi cores and other stuff 64 bit systems offer including more RAM. And even that one is in BETA.

[It's the winds of change.]

Originally posted by rat:

I'm tired of waiting 6 hours for a 5 minute video. Anyway to speed up render time?

To be honest, that's the speed time I want! As it takes me half that time for a 25 second video (believe me when I say I'm using a GTX 1080, BTW) Anyway, I believe getting rid of motion blur will help, maybe remove ambient occlusion, unless if you're using it for cinematic techniques, remove depth of field, and if you're exporting the video as an image sequence, and have enough space, use the TGA file format as it's the fastest at exporting. If you don't have lots of space, use JPEG, it's slightly slower and slightly lower quality, but you save gigabytes of overall space, and at the same time keeping not as good, but still great quality! This is what you should do if you want great quality, whilst speeding up rendering times in my opinion.

[ZergSquad]

Originally posted by It's the winds of change.:

Originally posted by rat:

I'm tired of waiting 6 hours for a 5 minute video. Anyway to speed up render time?

To be honest, that's the speed time I want! As it takes me half that time for a 25 second video (believe me when I say I'm using a GTX 1080, BTW) Anyway, I believe getting rid of motion blur will help, maybe remove ambient occlusion, unless if you're using it for cinematic techniques, remove depth of field, and if you're exporting the video as an image sequence, and have enough space, use the TGA file format as it's the fastest at exporting. If you don't have lots of space, use JPEG, it's slightly slower and slightly lower quality, but you save gigabytes of overall space, and at the same time keeping not as good, but still great quality! This is what you should do if you want great quality, whilst speeding up rendering times in my opinion.

nice necro, mate