Sony movie maker platinum 12 and AMD Radeon HD 7950

[Aaron Froom]

I've been struggling with this for quite a while now, and I keep hitting a brick wall regardless of where I look and what I try.

I'm trying to use OpenCL acceleration to render out my videos as my Phenom II 960T tends to result in 3-4X render length vs video length (2 hour render on a 20 minute video). Previously I've run into the "An unknown error has occured, the reason for this error could not be determined"; but more recently the render will go through, just not on my GPU (or if it is, it uses very little of my GPU.)

My setup is this:

AMD Phenom II x4 960T running stock everything (including cooling)
AMD Radeon HD 7950 Boost 3GB (Powercolor reference edition)
Asus MA588-V Evo mobo
G.Skill Sniper 8GB DDR3 1600 MHz
and my video editing is done on a Seagate 1TB 7200RPM Barracuda drive.
Sony Movie Maker Platinum 12 64 bit (build 896)

I've tried using mainconcept and sonyavc codecs, but no matter what I do the render time doesn't change, or if it does it is miniscule. I've disabled the onboard video in my bios and even made sure it isn't showing up in my device manager. I submitted a ticket to sony support but have yet to receive a response (going on a week now) and seeing as this issue has been here for a while I don't expect much from them. Another thing to note, I previously had an MSI Radeon HD 7770 Ghz edition card that had basically the same thing, so I don't think the issue is with my card.

 

[kenrivers]

You might find this an interesting read: http/www.sonycreativesoftware.com/Forums/ShowMessage.asp?Forum=12&MessageID=841101
The following is from that thread:
"Problem solved! I was playing around with the settings and clicked on the "customize template" button in the render templates box. At the bottom is a dropdown menu with the following choices: "Render using CPU only", "Render using OpenCL if available" and "Render using CUDA if available". Since I have an AMD/ATI Radeon video card, I picked the OpenCL option. Guess what? An 18 minute 1280x720 MP4 from a full HD video with Color Curves and light Sharpening rendered in five minutes!"

It looks like you're not the only one who has encountered slow render times. Have you checked to see what programs/services may be running before you render? There may be something running in the background that is using up a fair bit of the CPU and/or RAM. Have you applied any effects or transitions or anything else to the videos before you attempt to render the clip or is it just basic editing? When you exporting are you using a single pass or double pass? Sorry for so many questions. I'm just trying to rule out what isn't the problem.

 

[Aaron Froom]

I've checked through my running programs/services and its pretty minimal. this has happened on both Windows 7 and Windows 8 so far.

As for effects and transitions it is a 100% original video without any changes *except* for the cutts that I do, I don't really care for transitions, and as I do mainly lets plays I don't have a lot of need for effects. So pure raw video being sliced and re-ordered and then being encoded. I do single pass with default settings, screenshot of the video page here: http/i.imgur.com/U0pzeQZ.png

The primary issue I'm seeing is that the software just plain isn't using my GPU more than a fraction of a percent. It will top off at about 3% usage. but my CPU stays at full throttle.

 

[kenrivers]

I can't explain why it's not using the GPU more but it is understandable that the CPU usage is high. From what I understand rendering uses the CPU more than the GPU. Is 8 GB the maximum amount of RAM that you can install? Have you tested at various bitrates?

 

[Aaron Froom]

I have messed with the bitrates, that helps some but not much and the tradeoff for quality is pretty bad.

I can have more than 8GB of ram installed, but at the moment I'm waiting to upgrade my CPU(going to go with a new FX series cpu) before I replace/upgrade anything else. but from what I understand you shouldn't mix different types of ram, and since I can't find my current generation ram anywhere I've been putting it off.