Rendering is Painfully slow (RR-793)

  • It's disappointing that rendering in Videoscribe after all these years is so dismally slow. I am using a i7 and it's taking more than 45mins to render a 6min video. I'm using a few custom SVGs and 1080p Quicktime output, nothing overtly intensive! CPU usage is below 30% so it's clear Videoscribe is STILL not multi-threaded. For kicks I tried using the cloud-based renderer  Sho.co  and it takes hours, if not days, to render 5min files. This is unacceptable!

  • If I've done my maths correctly, that is approximately 3 frames per second being rendered. Each frame is a single 1920 x 1080 image and there are 25 frames for each second of video (assuming that is the framerate you are rendering at). 6 minutes multiplied by 60 is 360 seconds. 360 multiplied by 25 is 9000 frames. 45 minutes is 2700 seconds. 9000 frames divided by 2700 seconds is 3.33 frames per second.


    For me, I wouldn't call that dismally slow; it may be closer to average. I'm sure it could be improved but we do not have any plans at this time to do any work on the rendering speed.

  • I have the same problem, I it's so so slow to render a file...it's not acceptable 2'30 movie takes 45 min for me with almost only texts ! As your answer @Matthew Cook, you should take care about customers problems ! If I use my ESP or Explaindio softwares, it takes some seconds to render a file ! not hours ! At this point, I would almost ask for money back... if not, sure, I will not renew or upgrade anything.

    It's not planned ? Perfect, change your priorities, as this is a critical point ! Be agile

    If only I did test that during the trial period ! pffff

  • I think your scribe should probably be rendering about twice as fast as that. You could save your 2:30 project online and ask support for help, or you could attach a .scribe file here and ask the community for feedback.


    -Mike (videoscribe user)

  • Perhaps this is an expectation thing. I use Camtasia Studio and Adobe Premiere extensively so I have an expectation of how fast a video project should render. Both of these programs have support for GPU rendering and also support multiple CPU core configurations. Videoscribe does not... in fact my system's power is barely being used when rendering (great for multitasking but not so good for productivity).


    Even on older i7 hardware Adobe Premiere can render 4K video faster than Videoscribe can render 1080p  https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/Adobe-Premiere-Pro-CC-2015-3-CPU-Comparison-849/  1080p rendering at 3 fps is slow in my world, especially considering Videoscribe is not working with 3D graphics, color correction or complex pixel shading algorithms, only 2D vector shapes. Real time video rendering aka 1080p @25fps has been around for many years now in many video editing applications. Nvidia's new RTX 2080 can even render 3D ray tracing in real time.


    It's disappointing to hear that there are no plans to improve Videoscribe's rendering speed. The ease of use developing a scribe is certainly curtailed by the current long rendering times. I've also had issues with the cloud based renderer take days to render a project, and it's happened often enough that I won't use it any more for time critical projects.


  • I've added these comments to the development report and flagged this with the VideoScribe project manager. Hopefully this will help to push this into development.

  • Wow, I am shocked at the length of time it takes to render a file!  How does one tell that the video is actually rendering?  I don't see a progress bar or anything.   

  • If you are preparing your project efficiently, it may take about 10 minutes to render a 1 minute video, and the progress bar shows the rendering progress. If you are having longer rendering times, consider watching the tutorial videos or reading the following thread to determine how you can improve your project creation process: TIPS to avoid crashes, freezes failure to render (or slow rendering) and other problems.


    As mentioned in this thread, you can attach a .scribe file here, or save your project online, and raise a ticket if you would like customer support to help you identify problems with your project.


    Hope that helps,

    -Mike (videoscribe user)

  • Incredible funny and .... answer ! As I said, it takes some seconds with Explaindio or ESP, the problem is not us, the problem is in the software ! no solution = no renewal, easy for me ! Unstatisfied customer ! And I will give some advices to not use this software as well to the social networks !

  • Can you at least as a workaround offer a full-screen mode while playing the animations within Videoscribe so we can easily use a proper performing screen capture program? Begs the question though why rendering has to be so slow.

    Still, while performance is this frustratingly, painstakingly, incomprehensible slow, please add a full-screen mode.


    Arguing here because I really like a lot about your product.

  • Thank you for your feedback- I have added these to our development report; we hope to push this into development. 

  •  I am extremely happy to read this.

  • Have you guys found a solution for this ? There is no way to get video output by rendering this level .. i tried the option to upload to sho.co the software says there is some technical error so render cannot be completed ? So this software means only to see as demo?

  • Well, I should read about this before I subscribe VideoScribe plan. It is year 2020, and yes, the rendering time is still painstakingly sloooow... Hey, the first issue about this rendering time is in 2015. Come on guys! Can't you do anything to fix this and improve this amazing software? Maybe you should stop using cloud services if the problem with rendering time is not the software. Give us the installer version, the executable file like other software and let our computer do the work for us. 


    I have a quad core AMD laptop with 8GB of RAM and a SSD that barely use all of the potential when I'm rendering using VideoScribe. That is an issue for me, because I bought this laptop not for showing off the specifications to all of my friends, but to get money by using it. 


    Now, my question is, can you solve the problem or not? If you can't, maybe I should stop subscribing your service from today.


    Thank you!

  • I'm going to move this forum over the Ideas and feature requests forum as this is clearly a request for faster rendering. While we imporved things back in v2.3.1 clearly people still want things sped up.

    Now's it's a feature request you can vote for it (like the original post) and that will help us gauge its popularity and prioritise work on it.

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