Strategies for speeding up delivery?

I usually deal with 1080p 60fps video. My machine can edit this video with no problem. Occasionally i need to splice in 1600x900 25fps. This also edits well. My problem comes when i deliver video. I deliver 1080p 60fps Quicktime MPEG4.

When the regular video is encoding it is about real time speed 60fps. When i hit the other footage the render speed drops to 8 or 9fps.

Are there any ways to speed up the render speed?

My machine is a laptop with Core i7 3740QM 2.7GHz processor, 16GB or ram, AMD Radeon HD 7570M and Windows 7 64bit.

Use a much, much faster desktop machine with lots of cores, lots of RAM, beefy GPUs, and it will go a lot faster.

There's also some workaround.
I use caching a lot and set the cache codec to the final render codec. You can also optimize media to your render codec if you have H264 footage and the likes.
In delivery rab check use cache/optimized media.

That's how Ai handle it when the client wants to take the final render with him.

I usually deal with 1080p 60fps video. My machine can edit this video with no problem. Occasionally i need to splice in 1600x900 25fps. This also edits well. My problem comes when i deliver video. I deliver 1080p 60fps Quicktime MPEG4.

When the regular video is encoding it is about real time speed 60fps. When i hit the other footage the render speed drops to 8 or 9fps.

Are there any ways to speed up the render speed?

My machine is a laptop with Core i7 3740QM 2.7GHz processor, 16GB or ram, AMD Radeon HD 7570M and Windows 7 64bit.

When you hit a different type of source material Davinci needs to do more calculations to make it match the other material.
Effectively you are making Davinci both resize and retime and of those two the retime is by far the most demanding. What are your retime settings? Optical flow would result in about that speed.

As for speeding up the render, you have a few options: Either, as Mark said, get beefier hardware or have an other program do the frame rate conversion for you. My opention is that ffmpeg and it's frontends are the best way to go, but if you find something else that works better, please report back

In the same way the Resolve is not that great at H264 (long gop) playback i'd hazard a guess that it's pretty poor at encoding too. We always render out of resolve an intraframe master (usually OP1A MXF DNX 185X) which is crazy fast on optimised hardware and then use Media Encoder to create our deliverables.

My opention is that ffmpeg and it's frontends are the best way to go, but if you find something else that works better, please report back

Ffmpeg is a good idea, I didn't think of it even though i'm already using it. I have a Sony camera and I use it to unpack the audio to make it play in Resolve. I'm not experienced with ffmpeg at all, I found the command on line and made a batch file out of it.

Code: Select all

if not exist newfiles md newfiles
for %%A in (*.MTS) do ffmpeg -i "%%A" -vcodec copy -acodec pcm_s16le -ar 48000 -ac 2 "newfiles\%%~nA.mov"
pause

Using this command as a template I put together this.

Code: Select all

ffmpeg -i "input.mp4" -r 59.940 -s 1920x1080 -vcodec libx264 -acodec pcm_s16le -ar 48000 -ac 2 "output.mov"

It seems to encode ok but when I play it in Resolve the audio is ok and video is black.

Am I doing something wrong with the command?

Don't use things like 29.97 or 59.94!
It should be 30000/1001 and 60000/1001 as this is only correct version for fractional fps.

What about the players like VLC? Probably your source is 422 and you have made 422 h264 which Resolve doesn't support. You need to add -pix_fmt yuv420p.

Don't use things like 29.97 or 59.94!
It should be 30000/1001 and 60000/1001 as this is only correct version for fractional fps.

What about the players like VLC? Probably your source is 422 and you have made 422 h264 which Resolve doesn't support. You need to add -pix_fmt yuv420p.

Changing the frame rate from 59.94 to 60000/1001 did the trick. The video plays in Resolve normally now.

The previous video with the 59.94 frame rate played ok in VLC.

The batch file code looks like this.

Code: Select all

if not exist newfilescap md newfilescap
for %%A in (*.MP4) do ffmpeg -i "%%A" -r 60000/1001 -s 1920x1080 -vcodec libx264 -acodec pcm_s16le -ar 48000 -ac 2 "newfilescap\%%~nA.mov"
pause

How would one know that the frame rates should be integers or fractions? (I would have never guessed that this was the problem)

My opention is that ffmpeg and it's frontends are the best way to go, but if you find something else that works better, please report back

Ffmpeg is a good idea, I didn't think of it even though i'm already using it. I have a Sony camera and I use it to unpack the audio to make it play in Resolve. I'm not experienced with ffmpeg at all, I found the command on line and made a batch file out of it.

Code: Select all

if not exist newfiles md newfiles
for %%A in (*.MTS) do ffmpeg -i "%%A" -vcodec copy -acodec pcm_s16le -ar 48000 -ac 2 "newfiles\%%~nA.mov"
pause

Are you aware what those options specify?
You copy the highly compressed video, yet convert the audio to raw uncompressed wave format. You can convert it to AAC (-c:a aac -ac 2 -b:a 320k (for -codec:audio aac, AudioChannels 2, Bitrate:Audio 320k)) and save some space that way.

Using this command as a template I put together this.

Code: Select all

ffmpeg -i "input.mp4" -r 59.940 -s 1920x1080 -vcodec libx264 -acodec pcm_s16le -ar 48000 -ac 2 "output.mov"

It seems to encode ok but when I play it in Resolve the audio is ok and video is black.

Am I doing something wrong with the command?

Yes.

Oh you wanted to know what you did wrong? Sorry

You have a few options with regards to converting the video. (I am stealing info from https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/Encode/H.264 by the way).
1) Use the CRF (Constant Rate Factor) of 10 to 15 for nearly lossless conversion. Technically it should be 0, but then the files will be extremely large. (I just tested, with CRF 0 the file is larger than when converted to DNxHR 444.... And then there's no point).
2) Use a preset: medium, slow, slower, veryslow, placebo. I like placebo, but it takes a long time to convert (in the range of 2 fps with 12 cores maxed out). The problem is that you have no control over the bit rate when using presets. I have found the faster ones to give very poor quality.
3) Another way is to convert to mpeg4 (aka h.263). There you can force the quality to be the same as the input, but the files does not explode in size. It will further more be more responsive to edits (as in the delay when you cut or change something will be lower=> It will feel faster).

I will give the command lines for each option and let you test them out for yourself, see which gives a result you are happy with.
I kept your -AudioRate 48000, but I am not sure it is needed if your audio source is 48000 hz to begin with (ffmpeg will tell you that, but it does not matter

Option 1:

Code: Select all

if not exist newfiles md newfiles
for %%A in (*.MTS) do ffmpeg -i "%%A" -r 60000/1001 -s 1920x1080 -vcodec libx264 -crf NUMBER_HERE -pix_fmt yuv420p -c:a aac -ac 2 -b:a 320k -ar 48000 "newfiles\%%~nA.mov"
pause

Option 2:

Code: Select all

if not exist newfiles md newfiles
for %%A in (*.MTS) do ffmpeg -i "%%A" -r 60000/1001 -s 1920x1080 -vcodec libx264 -preset  PRESET_NAME -pix_fmt yuv420p -c:a aac -ac 2 -b:a 320k -ar 48000 "newfiles\%%~nA.mov"
pause

Option 3:

Code: Select all

if not exist newfiles md newfiles
for %%A in (*.MTS) do ffmpeg -i "%%A" -r 60000/1001 -s 1920x1080 -vcodec mpeg4 --q:v 1 -c:a aac -ac 2 -b:a 320k -ar 48000 "newfiles\%%~nA.mov"
pause