I’m back, after a fourteen-month break from video creation while I was on another project that took all my time.
I fired up ShotCut again, and - WOW! ShotCut on my machine had updated itself in my absence (I must have enable that magic long ago), and the difference is startling. I know there are a lot of new features, and that is what others are excited about; what I am excited about is the change in video exporting speed and resource usage.
GPU Utilization is up from 25% to 38%
Video Engine Utilization is up from 14% to 39%
CPU Utilization is now 90-100% on all threads and cores
The CPU clock boost is being properly triggered to max on all cores (3.6 Ghz instead of 1.4 Ghz)
The net result of this is that the exporting time, which was two to four times the video play length with the December 2018 version of ShotCut, is now shorter (slightly) than the video play length with ShotCut 20.2.
This is a major improvement in my production and time utilization.
I am very happy.
Re: Setting > GPU Effects
Two and three years ago, when the Setting > GPU Effects was clearly visible, and it required a reboot of ShotCut to make the switch, (and it was very very experimental and discouraged) I used it both ways at times, but ended up with GPU effects always set, first because I was using a few effects available only in the GPU set, and second because I needed the speedup the GPU gave me on export. (Without the GPU, Exports would take about ten times the run time of the finished video.)
The NVIDIA Server Settings window (which I always keep visible) tells me when the GPU is in use, so I could see the difference. ShotCut Export is the only app I have that uses the “Video Engine” at all, and that only when it is enabled in ShotCut.
I set the default in Export>Advanced to “Use hardware encoder” and it has stayed that way. (I checked to see a few minutes ago.)
I can no longer find a “GPU Effects” checkbox in “Settings” now that I have 20.02.17; however, I certainly do see both GPU Utilization and the Video Engine Utilization go wild when I do an Export. (Back in the day, when I would sometimes disable GPU Effects for debugging, those two would go to minimal and zero respectively.)