VSE render performance

I’ve been doing some performance tests with the VSE, nothing too scientific, but I would like to share my results.
I tried changing the render engine, removing any object or light from the scene, and some other things.
Apparantly it rendered the fastest when I used a completely empty scene and rendered the video using the “OpenGL render active viewport” button.

Some numbers:
Rendering 500 frames of 4K footage as a fullhd video took:

  • around 3 to 4 minutes using cycles or blender render with or without some scene content and default color management settings
  • around 2 minutes using opengl with scene content and default color management settings
  • around 1 minute using opengl without scene content and with default color management settings
  • around 5 minutes using cycles or blender render without scene content but with non-default color management settings (Film view, increased exposure and gamma, and one of the Kodak looks)
  • around 3 minutes using opengl without scene content and the same non-default color management settings

In conclusion: if there are no scene strips in use, I can see no reason why I would still press that “Animation” button :slight_smile:

(Maybe my system specifications might be a factor, but I suppose the differences will be similar or even more extreme with other peoples specifications, as I have a Ryzen 5 1600 cpu and only a nVidia GTX 1050 Ti gpu)

Oh, also: I now about Blender Render Controller, it took around 2 minutes using that (using 12 threads) with the same non-default color management settings. So not really worth it for 20s of footage, but still a lot faster than using that “Animation” button :slight_smile: