#S-L-O-W
20 messages in this thread
Greetings, all. Perhaps someone can answer me this:
A few weeks ago I had an unfortunate incident occur at my house. While in the
midst of rendering a 600 frame animation (about 30 hours or so) my 5 year old
daughter decided to help daddy turn off all the lights in the house (we were
leaving for school) and also hit the master switch for my computer desk. Total
shutdown. Now, since I was rendering directly to a flic, my file was gone. I
decided to start rendering again, but I kept running into memory problems
reloading the project file. Finally I deleted the incomplete mess from the temp
directory, and restarted the rendering.
For some reason though, the rendering was taking an EXTRA long time, like about
double. I have no idea why, but the animation that was only expected to take
about 40-45 hours to render, ended up taking 79 1/2 hours! I know I didn't
miscalculate, seeing as it was almost finshed the first time when my daughter
killed it.
After the rendering was complete, I did some testing. Not that I have any
benchmark proof, but I could tell that 3ds was running much slower, especially
rendering. It crawled. I decided to reinstall 3ds and reset all paramiters, but
it has not helped. As far as I know, It is set up exactly the way I had it
before. I am almost to the point of reformatting my hard drive and starting
from scratch. If anyone has any idea what happened, please let me know. I will
be grateful if I can get my speed back.
Greg.
P.S. My daughter still lives. Although it was touch and go there for awile.
Greg,
maybe the turbo switch on your computer get toggled off. I recommend you do a
bunch of hardware diagnostics, starting with sys info (norton or pctools), then
maybe using qa-plus or similar for a ram check.
Greg,
Just a thought but have you checked your computer's "turbo" switch?
Alec Jason
Hi Greg,
<< slow renderings.. >>
In addition to everyones suggestions…have you done an info status? Does 3ds
see all of your memory? Also, if you render a frame of your animation, are you
paging to disk? Also, when you set up rendering for the last flic, could you
have possibly chosen pallete mode = high instead of medium?
jonas[adesk]
The turbo switch is fine (c'mon guys). I only have 8 megs of RAM, so of course
I page to disk on EVERYTHING (it's only a hobby for me). I haven't checked to
see if 3ds sees all of it though. I do notice a LOT more disk activity than
usual though, so maybe that's it. I'll check that one out.
I kinda rule out any hardware problems, seeing as everything else SEEMS to run
as normal as before. I'll do some testing to make sure though. Thanks.
Greg.
Martin and Alec have good suggestions. Especially checking ALL the BIOS stuff
(something important could have changed). In addition, have you completely
checked your hard disk for errors? You should do a chkdsk /f and a de-frag to
make sure it is in good shape.
-Alan
Sounds like last week at my office. My wife was graciously vacuuming my office
while I was tinkering with a new hard drive on the SGI, until she reached down
in the tangle of cables to unplug the vacuum and found the plug to the SGI
instead. And then the SGI wouldn't boot… I bit through my tongue,
cold-booted, and it was OK. :-0
John,
>> I bit through my tongue, cold-booted, and it was OK. <<
What a gentleman! I wonder if you would have managed to hold your tongue if the
SGI hadn't been OK <g>.
That's why I NEVER let my husband vacuum my office. <bg>
Good one, Gayle! 🙂
ana /krazy images
The replies to your original message thus far are what I would try. One more
suggestion: how about purchasing a UPS? <g>
-TC
>> Finally I deleted the incomplete mess from the temp directory, and
>> restarted the rendering.
In addition to the other advice, you should run a DOS CHKDSK or SCANDISK (v 6.0
and later) to find and remove lost clusters. Also try a defragmenting utility
to clean up the hard drive. If there were any temporary swap files open, there
remains may still be around, cluttering up the drive.
This one's really to ALL…
Thank you for the quick responses. Help like this is one of the MAIN reasons I
joined Cserve.
After posting my message last night, I did do a LONG OVERDUE cleanup on my hard
drive (SCANDISK). I have also increased my uncompressed drive to 36 meg and
put the 3ds swap file there. This seems to have helped quite a bit. The only
test I have left is to render a frame or two from the original animation. When
it rendered BK (Before Kyliegh) a typical frame was going under 6 min at most.
AK, it was going up to 24 min! I'll let ya'll know what happens. Again,
thanks.
Greg.
P.S. Kyliegh, of course, being the infamous daughter.
Greg,
Since all the guys here gave you all the good answers, I just couldn't be left
out.
Ehmmmmmmmm…let me see now…
In addition to what everyone else suggested, I would make sure the oil gage is
where it should be and that the Cylinder head is OK. If this doesn't solve it,
I don't know what will.
Oh just thought I'd make your day. It has happened to almost everyone here.
W/ regards,
-Kouros
Suggestion for the future…
Render to individual files; gifs if you want a flc as your final output.
PMJI –
<render tp individual files; gifs if you want a flc…> I thought that was a
good suggestion – but if you do that, then string them together as a flic, what
happens with the palette?
Hi Gayle,
<< what happens to the pallete? >>
You still have the option of using medium or custom as described on pg 8-117,
when compositing the individual frames in video post's bitmap queue entry pg.
8-136 and pg 3-42.. ..
jonas[adesk]
Thanks, Jonas (and Wade) –
I've never done it that way, but it does seem a good idea to work with single
files (… especially for us folks with little people who love to push buttons
during renders. My 3 year-old considers it a personal challenge to find the
latest hiding places of the power strips).
See Jonas's answer. Custom palettes have always been the answer for me.