quicktime generation on my render farm

Deadline
1

Cheers,

i am trying to submit a quicktime generation job on my render farm and it seems to submit the job just fine. However the load time and actual render seem overly slow and taking way too long considering the task (rendering 400 frames to a quicktime). Am I doing something wrong here or is that how long it normally takes with this method?

Thanks.

-Christian

2

I have done some more testing with this and the stats are as follows: for a 300 frame sequence it took 20mins to generate the quicktime. Out of that 20 mins 16 mins was spent on the load time alone. The second render was 700 frames and this took 30 mins of which 25 mins was just the load time.

So there seems to be some slow load time with this method. Are there any settings for this or is this common behavior for the generate quicktime function?

3

Hi Christian,

Can you provide some information about the input files you’re creating the QT from? For example:

  • image format (exr, tif, jpg, etc)
  • average image file size

We just hook into the QT API and call a function that loads in the images, so we really don’t have any control over how these images are loaded. If the images are relatively large in size though, that could explain the slower performance because QT needs to load these files from their network location. In this case, it would be interesting to test a sequence of the same number of frames that are smaller in size (ie: jpg), just to see if the loading speed improves.

Cheers,

  • Ryan
4

Ryan, thanks. These files are typically 8mb tga files or dpx files. Is this considered big for the quicktime plugin?

5

If QT is loading 700 8MB frames, that means that it needs to read in 5.6GB of data over the network. QT also needs to process these frames as they’re read in, so it’s understandable that the loading part takes up the majority of the render time.

If you have QT pro, you can mimic what Deadline is doing by opening up QT and selecting File -> Open Image Sequence. Select the sequence of frames and press Open. Then select File -> Export, specify a file name, and press Save. I would expect the loading stage to take just as long as it does through Deadline. This doesn’t mean that the image files are too big, it just means that larger frames take longer to process.

Cheers,

  • Ryan