Problem:
Workflow comes to a complete halt when you have put some jobs into the queue, and newly initiated previews are therefor queued until the exports have been done.
Solution:
Previews should be processed with higher priority than (even running) exports, and it should always be possible to create a new preview immediately, even when the “maximum” amount of parallel running processes has already been reached.
Good idea?
ABSOLUTELY! I was just going to post the exact same thing. I may have 20 videos I want to enhance, but as soon as I put one or two in the queue I can no longer view previews. I don’t want to submit day-long encodes based on blind faith in some presets- I want to look at previews first.
My computer is fully capable of doing 4 encodes at a time. I may want max FPS on certain videos so they finish faster. So, I routinely set it to one or 2 because there is no way to define processing priority (which is another fault of VideoAI).
My PC is perfectly capable of handling the extra load of doing previews. Please allow previews to process normally even if they exceed the “maximum” process setting.
Good idea. The current work-around of opening another instance of TVAI should not been needed.
For this to work I guess TVAI would first need the possibility to pause and resume tasks which it still doesn’t have.
pause/resume is certainly a nice thing, but it would be sufficient to “tame” one running process in favor of a newly initiated one.
It’s not enough just slowing down one task but you’d often also need to free some memory for an additional encode to properly work - so, factually Topaz still would need some kind of task pausing and temporarily giving used resources free for such to reliably work.
Currently, I see no way of preparing additional jobs when an export job is already running. Yes you can queue new export jobs, but you can’t work with Previews that way, since they will be queued and run in different queues than the export jobs. There’s no way to pause a running export job either, only cancel it completely. Unless I missed something, this seems like a broken workflow to me.
Did you change the number of processes in the settings?
No, I haven’t touched those settings. Should I?
If you want more than one concurrent encode (doesn’t matter here if it’s a preview or a full encode), then yes.
Be aware though that the number of simultaneous encodings is dependent on your GPU RAM.
But as it sounded you might already be happy with 2 parallel encodings, enabling you to do one preview after another while doing a longer encoding in the background.
That fixes a the use case of having only one export job running and then prepare another one utilizing previews. However, this doesn’t fix the larger issue with this workflow, which breaks down whenever you have as many export jobs as you have number of simultaneous encodings enabled in the settings. It stops you from preparing more work that you can let run.
The real problem is priority management. It’s split between the export jobs and preview jobs, which should be the case. They should share the processing queue, so you can drag around these jobs. Simpler, but effective: have a setting that always prioritized preview jobs if there are any.
I think with the CLI you can prepare and run as many jobs as you want.
When i remeber right.
Until the gpu says no.
Again, same limitation. This is not about the capabilities or limits of the GPU, this is about workflow. Managing tasks, preparing tasks, executing tasks. This has nothing to do with how much a GPU can handle, but how you go about preparing and queuing work.
@jo.vo This feature request is a great request because export jobs take hours and preview jobs take seconds.
It’s obvious but — this means a producer like me needs to queue up multiple export jobs for one job. But then need to work on previews for the next job, in order to research for the rest of the day.
The fact is that the producer needs to do this research simultaneously while the exports are running.
You can’t increase the number of concurrent processes in the settings! It will just try to run more export jobs!
If you’re on the Mac then there’s an easy workaround: Just install the App twice with different names (e.g. TVAI4_encode and TVAI4_preview) and run them simultaneously.
Then you could have separate queues for previews and for actual encodes (even with different values on how many of them you could process simultaneously).
Better have enough VRAM for this…
Hope you have enough VRAM, only to watch 3 or 4 parallel jobs slow down to a snails pace of 2fps…
I have 100+ videos to work through, which is impossible with the current workflow. I can’t just spend a good day and queue them up and let them run for a week or two. I have to baby sit the process from beginning to end and it will take months now.
This is a good tip and I’ve actually done this for Handbrake recently — complete coincidence
Don’t run “3 or 4 parallel jobs” then. Run 1 or 2 including previews.
I guess you can run multiple previews but stick to just 1 long export job at a time.
Can you allow preview to override number of processes setting in preferences? I want exports files sequentially BUT if I set ‘processes’ to 2, VAI exports second file automatically, blocking further previewing.
I have to remove any pending exports, go into preferences to change processes to 2, do my previews whilst exporting one video, then go back into preferences, change processes back to one and then export multiple files in sequence! It would be so much easier if Preview was not constrained by processing settings.
Distinguishing between preview and export max processes would allow to simulatenously export 1 video and continue working by previewing other videos, so queued exports don’t start to run when “global” max processes is set to a value >1.
