Hi, I'm new to CTA3 and enjoying it so far!
I was wondering if anybody knows what influences the export speed. I've started CTA3 on my 2011 Mac mini i7 and recently upgraded to the new Mac mini i7.
There is not much difference in how long an export takes, so I tested it on different systems:

I used the 810 images Demo for Camera transitions and animation curves beach scene.

Windows 10 PC, 4-core AMD FX8350 4GHz, 16 GB DDR3 RAM, GeForce GTX 970 4GB GPU, SSD. Export to mp4 1080p: 2m:07s
Windows 10 PC, 4-core Intel i7 4780 4GHz, 32 GB DDR3 RAM, GeForce GTX 960 4GB GPU, SSD. Export to mp4 1080p: 42s
Mac mini, MacOS 10.14.3, 6-core Intel i7 8700B 3.2GHz (4.6GHz Turbo boost), 16 GB DDR4 RAM, Intel UHD Graphics 630 1.5GB, SSD: 1m45s

Seeing the faster time at the Intel PC, I thought the GPU is the driver for export, just like in Premiere Pro or Final Cut Pro. But my Mac mini with integrated GPU is faster than the PC with the fastest GPU, and the other PC with the smaller GTX 960 is much faster than any of them! Drivers and OS updates are all up to date. The 970 is has double the bandwidth of the 960 (256bit /128 bit)
The Mac mini has by far the fastest CPU with the latest 6-core i7. So I don't see if the CPU or GPU drives the performance here. Is it single core or multi core processing. Looking into the graphs while exporting, the CPU is below 50% and GPU is also about 20-25% at all systems.
What do I have to do to get faster export times? I am planning to get an external GPU (Thunderbolt 3) for my Mac Mini but don't see any reason if this makes it faster.
Thank you all in advance!

Maikeru

It seems the slower PC with FX8350 speeds up when I'm disabling AntiVirus (Bitdefender), still at 1m48s. To correct the Intel PC, it's a 3.6GHz i7 4790. Does CTA only render with a single core?

Hi...

Unlike 3D software like iClone, the GPU is not so important for Crazytalk Animator. CPU is more important and you will find you will get the best results with Intel CPU's rather than AMD. 

Overall though I would not consider 40 seconds or even 2 minutes a particularly long time to render the Camera Transition project. This may be because if you are used to working in 3D you will face much longer render times. However, I have passed on your feedback to the CTA team and will update again should I have further information to share. Thanks.


                                                                

Peter
Forum Administrator

www.reallusion.com

Thanks Peter, that's what I've thought. Also what I've found that exporting to MOV on my MAC (i7 6core 8700B) is slower than exporting to MP4 on the Windows PC (older i7 4 core 4970). Unfortunately my CTA3 pipeline doesn't give me a mp4 option for rendering the video on my Mac. Is something like this planned or are there licensing problems for this?

Thanks,
Maikeru7

Hi... MP4 support is under consideration for the future but will not be available in the initial CTA4 release.


                                                                

Peter
Forum Administrator

www.reallusion.com