Graphics card to speed up rendering times

[Steve Shovlar]

OK I am now making blu-ray dvd and have a load of work lined up this year. (weddings)

I just rendered out a two hour blu-ray dvd and it takes a long time/ About 5 times the lengh of the movie, plus menues etc on top. Then the same again to render the whole blu-ray project back to SD. This is unacceptable as it ties the mac up for too long. I dread to work on it in case it messes up the rendering. meaning I would have to start it all again.

My mac is a 2 X 3 Dual core 3.0 GHz with 4 Gb RAM, so no slouch.

So my question is, would a pro graphics card speed up the process? And if it would, which graphics card would you recommend?

 

[Ursa]

As far as I know: no

sorry for not knowing more about that. It has never helped on PC (except on Avid Liquid).

But you might find out something more on FCP forums and so on.

Good luck

 

[Demistate]

After effects allows you to use OpenGL to do renders, but they are draft quality because it doesn't anti-ailias all of the edges of your vectors, nor does it allow motion bluring.

However it does help you get draft renders out quickly so that you can preview with clients.

The only thing you can do to speed up your rendering is 1) get more CPU, or 2) get more memory (if your render actually uses up all of your memory).

If you're on Windows XP you can see where the bottleneck is usually by using the TASK MANAGER (hotkey CTRL + SHIFT + ESC) during a render and checking out the performance tab.

 

[Steve Shovlar]

Thanks for the answers. As I suspected. My mac is quick but 2 years old. Guess I will have to think about chopping it in and getting a quad core.

Cheers
Steve

 

[ase619]

Well I'm sure there will be a difference with mac, but I would suggest a quad, it saves me so much time. I have a p4 3.5 ghz 3megs ram ect.... took me about 49hrs to render a full 1080 clip that I was just testing out effects. The same project on my 3gig quad with 3gig ram rendered in crap now I can't remember, think it was bout 5hrs.