I need help/suggestions to improve the rendering time

Help/How To
1

I have an old laptop, I was thinking if it is worth replacing the HDD with an SSD, will the SSD improve the rendering time? Will I see any difference, or it will be the same?

2

I assume you are using Windows…

When you are exporting, open the Windows Task Manager and look at the CPU utilization. Is the CPU running at 100%? If so, then a faster hard drive will not make it faster. If the CPU is <100%, then a faster hard drive might make it faster.

1 Like
3

When I started using Shotcut about a month ago, I did some rendering tests to compare render times between my NVME drive and my normal HDD. I use a single 500MB MP4 video as my source file. My output resolution is set to 2K with all other settings are at default.

With Hardware Encoder enable:
NVME render time: 7.00 minutes
NVME Output Size: 550MB
HDD render time: 7.08 minutes
HDD Output size: 550MB
CPU Usage: 40%, Sometimes 50%

With Hardware Encoder disable:
NVME render time: 11.30 minutes
NVME Output Size: 250MB
HDD render time: 12.00 minutes
HDD Output Size: 250MB
CPU Usage: Normally 80-90%, but sometimes 100%

It seems that using SSD doesn’t really affect render time that much, at least for me. But if I store my files on a normal HDD, I would have some trouble when working with multiple large files (like above 5 GB). The preview window doesn’t work properly anymore, it sometimes just gets stuck and I can’t see anything. Zooming in and out on the timeline is also very laggy. This doesn’t happen when using SSD.

If you’re using a laptop, then hardware encoder probably wouldn’t be much help to reduce render time. However, I believe that all laptops should use SSD; the difference is night and day.

4

The drive type has almost no effect on rendering speed. As a rule, during rendering, the processor, video card and RAM are actively used. I would rank the computer components in order of importance to Shotcut: Processor - Video Card - RAM - Storage. The processor most strongly influences the speed in this case.

5

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