Rendering takes too long

Hi.

I'm trying to render a 2 hours video in 4K. The image isbstatic just a highbres picture and the audio is a 3min song in loop.

I'm using DaVinci Resolve free version. It doesn't allow to use my laptop's integrated Intel graphic card. It's tendering using software so it takes 8 hours.

I search for info and I found only the paid version allows to use the card lowering the task to 2 hours. But it costs 200 or 300 dollars.

Do you know any alternatives? Maybe another app?
Thank you.

Rauru said:

Hi.

I'm trying to render a 2 hours video in 4K. The image isbstatic just a highbres picture and the audio is a 3min song in loop.

I'm using DaVinci Resolve free version. It doesn't allow to use my laptop's integrated Intel graphic card. It's tendering using software so it takes 8 hours.

I search for info and I found only the paid version allows to use the card lowering the task to 2 hours. But it costs 200 or 300 dollars.

Do you know any alternatives? Maybe another app?
Thank you.

Click to expand...

I have been using this software on my mac for a year or two. I don't think you are going to get something as good as DaVinci Resolve, atleast for free. I also don't think getting the paid version will be any better. Perhaps try out Blender's 2D mode and see if it renders quicker. Blender is much tougher to work with though.

You need better setup for video editing. You don't need a monster machine, but something with atleast 8gb graphics card, or get an older apple silicon macbook pro, like m1 pro / max.

You definitely need a better machine at least with a graphics card

If it's literally just a static 4K image + a 3-minute audio loop, I wouldn't spend 8 hours rendering it in Resolve.

I'd first check whether you actually need 4K for the final file. If the video is going to YouTube, you can still export 4K, but I'd try a much simpler workflow with a lightweight encoder instead of rendering the whole timeline like a normal edited video.

You could also create the 2-hour video by generating the audio track once and then muxing it with the static image. There's no reason to process every frame through a full editing application when almost nothing is changing.

The bottleneck here sounds more like the workflow than the software itself.

I solved it. So I'll leave here the solution in case it's useful for somebody else.
With this method I could even generate 10 hours videos.

Generating the 4K video with the static image using Davinci Resolve free version. But the length is just the song i.e. 3 minutes. Of course I lower the constant bitrate to about 3.000 as the image doesn't change.

Calculating with some free AI like Gemini how many times the 3 minutes video should repeat to last 2 hours.

Then I use a Windows command for FFMPEG to copy and merge the 3 minutes video as many times as I needed to get a 2 hours video. FFMPEG performs this operation in less than 5 minutes.

The 2 hours video is ready to upload to YouTube.