Animation Rendering Performance Problem

[Weber]

I'm currently on take 3 or so of a video I'm attempting to create.  Anyway when it begins rendering, it starts out at a pace of 6 sec. per frame.  Then 8 hours later it has climbed to a snail like 27s per frame after which I end up with 1056 or so frames completed.  Does anyone know what causes this and how I can fix it?

I have thread count on calculations at 8
And priority set to normal.

Here are my render settings:

1280x720 resolution
2x AA

DE stop 1.2
Raystep multiplier .3
Stepwidth limiter .1
Stepcount for binary search 10
Smooth normals 2

[bib]

There is a strong probability that this is due to the fractal params themselves. Have you tried to individually calculate a keyframe from the beginning and another one from the end to compare?

By the way, you can use the render preview feature, very useful to check that your anim looks good, instead of rendering it multiple times.

[Weber]

Ok well I tried what you suggested and rendered the beginning vs later on in the animation.  It is much slower, because I suppose when zoomed in there is a lot more detail to render(didn't think of that).

And yes I use the render preview window, however some problems occur deep within the animation and I never preview the whole thing since it takes a long time just for the preview to render.

Anyway I think I have it figured out now on the third try.  I simply added more keyframes to smoothen the animation some more.  If need be I can edit certain areas in Sony Vegas, one really nice feature is "slowmotion" which simply adds more frames to the specified length of video.   

[Weber]

Two nights ago it was at 45 sec. per frame and now it's about 1:12 per frame to render. And I finished 3122 out of 8160 frames in 4 days with the render time increasing with each frame.  Is this a normal behavior?  Does everyone have to deal with this?  It just seems a little extreme only to render a 2 minute video especially when it takes less than an hour to complete the entire animation sequence.  Gahhh...I guess it is what it is.

[Sockratease]

Two nights ago it was at 45 sec. per frame and now it's about 1:12 per frame to render. And I finished 3122 out of 8160 frames in 4 days with the render time increasing with each frame.  Is this a normal behavior?  Does everyone have to deal with this?  It just seems a little extreme only to render a 2 minute video especially when it takes less than an hour to complete the entire animation sequence.  Gahhh...I guess it is what it is.

Didn't you answer this yourself?

Ok well I tried what you suggested and rendered the beginning vs later on in the animation.  It is much slower, because I suppose when zoomed in there is a lot more detail to render(didn't think of that).

...

Yes - that can easily be considered normal.

Remember how long a single frame can take deep in the Mandelbrot Set!  People suffer far longer times than that, trust me.

[Weber]

Ok thanks I just needed to vent...and get some reassurance that this is indeed normal. 

[kameelian]

Normal?

Oh how I dream of renders at your "snail like 27s per frame".

Yes indeed.

Kam

[rahulmukerji]

My 2 cents:

My renders (typically @ 800x600) with AA=1, generally take 1:00~1:30 mins per frame. But that is on my quad core Desktop running nothing else. I have 10400 frames being rendered on that machine and its been up for 5 Days + and its almost done.

Now on my laptop which is a Dual Core model I've been able to render only 2000 odd frames in 5 days. Huge difference in computational power. So the underlying hardware contributes a LOT to your render time. RAM not so much, Number of CPU's and their processing speed is your key component, as per my experience so far.

Reiterating what Sockratease said: the render depends on the complexity of the image. You're lucky if your frames are rendering in seconds as opposed to minutes. Plus your image size is quite a bit larger than mine.

I tried mine at ~1200 and it clocked 3:00+ mins per frame, shooting my render timeline to weeks. On my other thread I got feedback saying its not uncommon for people to have renders running for months and such.