Quote The topic heading says it all really.
I like the use of the LUTS files. They are often used to give clips from different cameras or different times a more uniform look.
Or just to create a certain 'mood'.
however in PWD once you apply a LUTS to your video, the rendering time goes out of the window. A 1 hour video will then take over 3 hours to render. Without the LUTS it would just about take just under an hour on my system.
I had hoped this would be improved in version 18 but it has not been.
so I am wondering is this something that can be fixed?
I do understand color matching etc but I am referring specifically to the situation where you apply a specific LUTS to the whole video.
A colour lift for example.

Hi Loe,

I'm fairly new to applying LUTs , and I agree that they really slow down the rendering process.

I reckoned it was because you're then asking the computer to perform a change to every single frame of the video in the time-line.
In making time-lapse videos, I've often asked a graphics package to batch process over 1000 images to get them all looking the same. That can take a while to complete as well.

I rarely attempt to edit videos one hour in length, but if I convert my 5 minute shorts to the same degree, I reckon that my computer would take about that long as well...

You don't say what resolution you're working at - I always produce two copies, one at 3840 x 2160 h.265
and another version at 1940 x 1080 h.264 as more universally viewable. (My machine blasts through these much, much faster).
I have a Ryzen 2700 over-clocked to 4GHz, an Nvidia 1070 8Gb graphics card and 32 Gb RAM.
(No slouch, but many users of PD18 will be editing on faster, more capable machines.)

I will add however, that in the search of finding a program with better capabilities in the implimentation of LUTs, I started playing with a few alternative software packages last week... (The 'Usual suspects' when you google for "Best video editing software")
Without exception, their rendering times proved to be totally abysmal compared to the speeds I was getting from PD18 !
(Around 25 - 30 minutes to render a 5 minute clip ? ! ? )
This experience has re-affirmed my belief that for the moment, PD18 is still the best program for me.

Now if I could just get my 10 bit HLG files to play nice with a LUT, then I'll be happy.
(My HLG files just 'Produce' a black screen - I've no no idea why, ALL my other 10 bit files work great ! )

Gerry

Quote


Hi Loe,

I'm fairly new to applying LUTs , and I agree that they really slow down the rendering process.

I reckoned it was because you're then asking the computer to perform a change to every single frame of the video in the time-line.
In making time-lapse videos, I've often asked a graphics package to batch process over 1000 images to get them all looking the same. That can take a while to complete as well.

I rarely attempt to edit videos one hour in length, but if I convert my 5 minute shorts to the same degree, I reckon that my computer would take about that long as well...

You don't say what resolution you're working at - I always produce two copies, one at 3840 x 2160 h.265
and another version at 1940 x 1080 h.264 as more universally viewable. (My machine blasts through these much, much faster).
I have a Ryzen 2700 over-clocked to 4GHz, an Nvidia 1070 8Gb graphics card and 32 Gb RAM.
(No slouch, but many users of PD18 will be editing on faster, more capable machines.)

I will add however, that in the search of finding a program with better capabilities in the implimentation of LUTs, I started playing with a few alternative software packages last week... (The 'Usual suspects' when you google for "Best video editing software")
Without exception, their rendering times proved to be totally abysmal compared to the speeds I was getting from PD18 !
(Around 25 - 30 minutes to render a 5 minute clip ? ! ? )
This experience has re-affirmed my belief that for the moment, PD18 is still the best program for me.

Now if I could just get my 10 bit HLG files to play nice with a LUT, then I'll be happy.
(My HLG files just 'Produce' a black screen - I've no no idea why, ALL my other 10 bit files work great ! )

Gerry

Thanks for confirming your experience. I thought all this would be the case.
All my clips are 4K but like yourself, I render in HD quality. My graphics card is a gtx 1050 TI and the processor runs at 4.3
So normally PWD is very fast. I use LUTS when there are clips from multiple cameras or to get a different ' mood' or just lift colour a bit. But it shows that if someone wants to use LUTS frequently you need to be aware of all this. Nothing is wrong. It just takes much longer.

Quote Nothing is wrong. It just takes much longer.

It seems that LUT uses only the CPU for processing. It would be interesting to have a common test, so we can gage the results with different CPU's to see how much difference there is

Maybe add 10x in the timeline the video with the skater and apply same LUT file? Encode in 1080p then, H264 and H265 (the encoding part uses GPU, so that would affect some degree the results too). But if we have cards from the same generation, that would not matter that much. For example I have a GTX1080, it has the same hardware encoder as the 1050Ti, or 1070, so same speed of encoding there.

Quote

Maybe add 10x in the timeline the video with the skater and apply same LUT file? Encode in 1080p then, H264 and H265 (the encoding part uses GPU, so that would affect some degree the results too).

So just to compare the rendering times...

I placed 'Skateboarder' onto the timeline 10 times resulting in a 'Movie' that was 2:38:20 long.

I 'Produced' this 4 times.
I produced this twice with no Lut applied...
I also applied the 'Color Enhance' LUT supplied with the program and produced another two times.

I produced all the clips at 1080p 25 fps. 16Mbps for h264, 11Mbps for h265.

Times to 'Produce' were as follows...

h.264 - No Lut - Render Time = 12 seconds - File size 283,892 Kb
h.264 - 'Color Enhance' applied - Render Time= 3 mins 16 seconds - File size 308,073 Kb

h.265 - No Lut - Render Time = 14 seconds - File size177,894 Kb
h.265 - 'Color Enhance' applied - Render Time= 3 mins 14 seconds - File size 184,406 Kb

Interesting that h264 won the the 'No LUT' race and lost the 'LUT applied' race !
However, on my machine they were so close as to go un-noticed when 'Producing' in the real world.

Let's say average time for 'No LUT' = 13 seconds, average time for 'Color Enhance' applied = 195 seconds...

The 'Movie' length was 158.8 seconds long.

So when producing 1080p movies, my machine renders at 12 x faster than real time... (Feels about right, I'd've said 10x )
When 'Producing 1080p movies with a LUT applied, my machine renders at 0.8 x real time.

When I render in 4K, my render times are far slower - but they are not so dramatic...

More like (Guessing here) - 0.75x for no LUT, but circa 0.3x when a LUT applied - ie 15 mins to render a 5 minute clip with a LUT.

Gerry

Quote
I produced all the clips at 1080p 25 fps.

Why is that? Is your PC display or the phone display working at 50Hz?
The modern LCD TV's are nothing else than computer displays connected to ARM chips, they work better ar 60Hz (or 30 FPS).

Anyway, I did use the "Color Enhance" like you did and on my machine I had (1080p, 30 FPS, H264 or H265):
No effects: 18"
Color Enhance LUT: 5'06" = 306"

Strangelly PD used my two physical CPU's, but it maxed at only 33% CPU utlization for overall. Each CPU is a 8 core (16 threads) Xeon E5-2667 V2 at 3.3GHz.

I'm pretty sure forum members have discussed this previously, but I can't put my finger on the thread.

Anyway...

I dropped 10x Skateboard (00;02;39;14 duration) in the timeline & got the following results in render times when produced to 720p @ 5Mbps:

No colour/enhance applied - 8sec (factor of ~0.05 real time)
LUT applied to all - 1min 3sec (factor of ~0.39 real time)
Colour preset applied to all - 5min 41sec (341sec) (factor of ~2.13 real time)

I know we were discussing LUTs, not presets, but everything's relative, eh? Rendering using colour presets is ~5-6x slower than rendering with LUTs.

Cheers - Tony

Oops! Had to edit because I'd only used 5x Skateboard at first.
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Some of the effects are GPU processed, much faster.

I wonder if LUT's are that way, as opposed to the presets. I don't work too much with LUT, I prefer to capture the right balance in the camera.
IMO any later change of video (or photos), will reduce the quality, due to nature of the compressed signal and limited data width (8 bit per color). Of course, trimming and joining are exceptions.

LE: I see that everyone's results are around 5 minutes for the preset. In my case, during this process, the CPUs were used only to 33%, GPU at some 12-18%, the drive read/writes were very minimal, max RAM usage was below 2GB (I have 64GB avail)...

It's again a matter of a hidden bottleneck that I found present in all the previous versions of PD.

LLE: Requirements points to the fact that Cyberlink are still using DX11. Maybe that's the bottleneck, DX12 was supposed to eliminate a lot of the latencies.
https://www.cyberlink.com/support/product-faq-content.do?id=24396&prodId=4&prodVerId=1417&CategoryId=-1&keyword=system%20requirements

Quote
Why is that? Is your PC display or the phone display working at 50Hz?

Here in the UK that's pretty normal...
We even have the audacity to watch TV using PAL instead of NTSC.

My 'Home Movie' clips aren't much better to watch at 50fps if I'm honest !

The only filming I do at 50fps is from my GoPro 6 Black, mounted to my soapbox racer.
I generally produce these clips to make 25fps final versions, but if anything 'Interesting' happens, then I can slow things down a tad.


I was thinking just how fast these renerding times are compared to when I first tried to start editing...


OK, in 1991, there was no home PC capable of editing was there ?
These were the days of feeding my Hi8 camera through a magic box that could play with the colour a little, into my SVHS recorder that could 'Insert edit' onto a blacked tape... (This set up cost a mint, far more in 'Real' terms than my current system !)

The first computer I used to play with video was the humble Commodore Amiga 500 with its 'Genlock' adding titles.
I didn't 'Edit' on a home PC until Windows 98 worked with USB and I aquired a video card capable of capturing video.
Back then, producing 640 x 480 files took an age !
The idea of 'Producing' a dvd file at well over 10x speed was incomprehensible.


And yet we now moan when our editing production slows down below real time !


My current PC was bought with video editing in mind.
(My old 2nd generation i7 with 8Gb RAM was getting a little overawed by 4K files.)
It currently has a Ryzen 2700 sitting on a 470X motherboard.
(It started life as 1700 on a 370X, but the combo 'Failed' and was replaced under waranty)
The processor is over-clocked to 4GHz and is water cooled.
Graphics card is nVidia 1070 8Gb (Truly ridiculous idea back in the 1990's ! )
I have 32 Gb RAM.
2 ssd's, one in the M2 socket and a disc based hard drive to store 'Produced' work.
I only use one monitor, LG 32 inch 4K. It works.
Sound from USB connected AudioEngine 2 speakers.


My software has always been upgraded only when I saw the need, so I've missed out on several PD versions since first getting Version 5 very cheap. I had PD10, then 13. I upgraded to 15 when I played with 360deg video for the first time and now I have PD365 as it allows me to import 10 bit 4K files from my Fuji X-T3.
(Just so long as I don't want to apply a LUT to my HLG files... For some reason I can't manage that yet, I produce black screens with sound only...)


I accept that the limiting factor on producing masterpieces is ME !
I simply don't have the ability to justify anything better for quite some time.


I dream that in ten years time, I'll live somewhere that is geographically suitable for producing day to night, astro-photography time-lapse masterpieces... Yet I know that in the correct hands, I have the kit capable of this right now.


On the subject of LUTs - Please Mrs CyberLink, can we have the ability to apply LUTs with a degree of control ?
Yes, I have tried ynotfish's opacity trick on a lower track of a time-line... Fantastic tip, Many thanks. It works.
But then the rendering times take a real hit then don't they ? !

Gerry

As a side note, there is no more PAL or NTSC. Those were analog only standards, in UK you did away with that in 2012.
BBC is run by a bunch of older technical guys. At this point they could throw anything on the air, 24 ,50 or 60 FPS, the DVB-T2 digital systems can display all, it's just like a computer video stream - MPEG4. Your computer screen runs at 60 Hz, the phone screen dis 60Hz, why keep the jerkiness resulted at run time from conversion? Even your TV can do 60Hz!

Quote As a side note, there is no more PAL or NTSC. Those were analog only standards, in UK you did away with that in 2012.
BBC is run by a bunch of older technical guys. At this point they could throw anything on the air, 24 ,50 or 60 FPS, the DVB-T2 digital systems can display all, it's just like a computer video stream - MPEG4. Your computer screen runs at 60 Hz, the phone screen dis 60Hz, why keep the jerkiness resulted at run time from conversion? Even your TV can do 60Hz!

All true. - Though both my monitor and TV can do more than 60Hz if required.
I dare say I could record and produce at higher fps - Though some people do have older stuff they want to play back on.
My own TV is 65 inch, 4K and can play just about any format I throw at it - (Though it looks better in 'Native' 4K).
I play my home videos on it via a usb hard drive.

I always produce alternative 'HD' versions of all my clips as they're more universally acceptable to friends/family.
Hell, I've been known to resort to still burning dvd's for some of my family ! - Curiously they've never asked for a blu-ray... I have a burner capable of producing them that I've never used for this purpose.

I have been playing with some ancient 'Analogue' stuff this very week though. - Hi8 videos shot in the early 1990's in PAL at 25fps.

I've been transfering them into loss-less avi files. I hear the latest PD-365 doesn't play nicely with these - but luckily still have a 'Stand alone' version of PD15 installed on my computer.

As I write I'm scouring Ebay for a working Hi8 player as mine is playing up - (Audibly suffering and glitching all too often)
I can't risk it chewing up another tape ! - Current machine is my 'Original' circa 1991, I think it's objecting to having been in the loft for too many years. Now, do I get another old Sony 'Deck' player, or just get an old camcorder - these are very much choices I'm debating - at least I have no requirements for jog shuttle controls etc any more - I'm just transfering the tapes and using the PC for editing. Hence my brain is currently still in PAL mode !

Gerry

I know how it is. I have a few Hi8 and Digital8 tapes and two camcorders that I didn't use in probably 10 years. I also have a Multiformat VHS player with digital conversion either at input or output. Good old times...
Samsung SV-5000W Worldwide VHS Format VCR