What exactly does it mean, if someone renders a video?
why do people even film in formats they do not like to use?
People are over simplifying what it means to render when they say it's just file conversion. While it's true that you may have multiple video types or even just one that's different from your final desired format and the software needs to convert everything as it saves, rendering is more than that... If you have effects of any type the rendering process is calculating the effect and saving its results frame by frame. If you imagine a "simple" effect like colour correction when you go to render the video it will colour correct each frame as it saves the video. In a 29 FPS 10 minute video that's 17,400 frames that need to be colour corrected. Let's say it takes your machine .25 seconds to colour correct each frame, that's 72 minutes (over an hour) just on colour correction. It's CPU mostly although you can offload some rendering to your GPU as well.
Things get even more complicated if you're working with 3D and/or any sort of lighting effects as it has to calculate reflections, shadows, and things of that nature. On my rig which has an i7-4770 and 32GB of RAM it took just shy of 8 minutes to render this single still image: http://i.imgur.com/YqfOp5V.png now imagine if it was some sort of video even one 29 FPS for 30 seconds would take forever to render... Actually 3D is the best way to illustrate what rendering is: this, http://i.imgur.com/Vir5glW.jpg is unrendered.. The rendering process is where all of the reflections, glow, and shadows come from. In simplest terms rendering is taking a bunch of parts and settings and creating a final product, not just conversion.
Create an account or sign in to comment
You need to be a member in order to leave a comment
Create an account
Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!
Register a new accountSign in
Already have an account? Sign in here.
Sign In Now