Optmal rendering parameters for video - ?

[Sfumato]

Dear friends,
I've got several newbie questions concerning rendering\encoding video and not sure what is the right board to place them.
I've got absolutely no experience in video encoding and encoded my first test video a couple of days ago.
 I'll ask one main question here as not absolutely sure it is the right plave to post the topic:
It took me 8 hours to render 400 BMPs 500x300 pxs (20 sec @ 20fps) in Mundelbulb 3D v. 1.7. The fractal was very simple and the render parameters were minimal.
Now I am working on my second video based on a more complicated fractal. I sacrificed DOF to make the process faster, but even now I understand that taking into consideration 1 picture 600x800 pxs takes 20 minutes render (raystep multiplier and stepwidth limiter should be at least 0.01, I couldn't go higher - the pics look ugly) my planned 3 minute video will be ready in 25 days! I tried to use "lighter" parameters to make it 10 times faster (2.5 days) but the quality of the render was very very poor.
I don't believe that hundreds of videos of that kind uploaded to YouTube are all rendered on supercomputers (I've got Quad 9650 with enough memory and guess neither my hardware is the bottleneck, nor Windows7). 
Please explain me where the hidden resources are? Or tell me please what should I read/study to find the optimal parameters.
Thank You in advance,
Sfumato.

[Madman]

It's difficult to tell what you should do without a post of the parameters, but I can think of a couple of tricks. The first one is one you don't want to hear : Increase your RM and SWL. Another important factor to increase speed is reduce Zend (or the "far plane" in the Navigator) as much as you can. Increasing the DE stop will help too, but this will cause loss of detail (which isn't necessarily a bad thing). And even then, you'll still need a little (or a lot!) patience.

[Sfumato]

Thank You! 'Far Plane' reduction is a good idea, I didn't get what RM and SWL stand for (English isn't my native).
With kindest regards,
Sfumato.

[Jesse]

Thank You! 'Far Plane' reduction is a good idea, I didn't get what RM and SWL stand for (English isn't my native).
With kindest regards,
Anthony.

'Raystep Multiplier' and 'Stepwidth Limiter' in the calculation tab, but if you can't increase them, the formula is a hard nut to render and a good video would take that long.
Maybe you could change some formula settings to make it render more easily, if i, we should check this, please post a keyframe or some parameters with the formula.

[Sfumato]

Thank You so much, Jesse!
Have a lovely weekend,
Sfumato.

[Jesse]

Thanks for the parameters, it seems that the formula is a bit 'unlucky' for animating, because the distance estimates (the way the program is rendering the fractal) seems to be not continuous, what leads in certain areas and distances to noise.  Would this not happen, you could use normal settings like Raystep_multiplier=0.3 and Stepwidth_limiter=1.

Sockratease just showed a video in another thread modifiying the DEstop value, showing very well the same issue: in some distances noise appears because the distance estimate makes a step.

Just have to figure out why this happens and how to avoid this.. no guarantee if i find a solution.

Cheers!

[Jesse]

Hi Anthony,

DoF is also reducing noise, but only in blurred regions of course.

I have to correct my previous posting, it seems that the DE's are more or less correct, but the issue is that the fractal contains of lot of layers and the binary search can't really find always the top layer, what leads to holes in the surface and that generates noise (black pixels).

Maybe i can find a better suited binary method option for that, dunno.


PS: There is no 64 bit M3D version, you might mixed it up with Mandelbulber?

[Sfumato]

Thank You very much, Jesse!
With best regards,
Sfumato.