Is This Reasonable? 1:30 time ratio...

[Dillon Brown]

I am currently in post-production for a short film and have been in the process of transcoding native 4K R3D files to 2K Quicktime ProRes (HQ) files at Half Res (High). Needless to say, we have about an hour or hour and a half of raw footage to transcode and it took about 30 hours to complete the process. So about a 1:30 ratio... this seems WAY too long, especially considering the specs of our system.

Mac Pro 2.8 GHz Dual Xeon, 4 GB of RAM, no other processes running

Raw footage stored on External G-Drive via FireWire 800 and transcoded from the drive onto both the same drive and another, to see if it went faster. But it was the same speed.

I did notice that the settings in Redrushes were set to only utilize one core so is that the problem? I am just perplexed as to why it is going so slow and it is not conducive to our turnaround times....

Thank you for any assistance!

 

[Uli Plank]

Get a minimum of 2 GB of RAM per core and you'll see at least 6 cores rendering…

 

[Dillon Brown]

Thanks for the response! So if we have 4 GB of RAM we can have 2 cores running, correct? So it should speed up the process? Anything else that may be influencing the rather slow transcoding times?

 

[Uli Plank]

I'm not sure if that ratio is linear, since the OS is grabbing quite some RAM too. Normally RR is figuring out how many cores to use as an optimum. Bus load and disk speed are probably the two other important factors, so a RAID should help to some degree.
But expect long rendering times, my early 08 machine with 16 GB RAM, a small RAID and 6 cores running needs a factor of 10 to 1 for "Half High" and 47 to 1 for "Full" – high quality debayering is a complex calculation!