[HELP] with Making Exports FASTER

[orgildinio]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
Export is slow on Apple M silicon, need utilize media engine from Apple silicon.

Additional context

M4 pro chip, 24gb ram. exporting takes more than recording time

[siddharthvaddem]

• It does use hardware acceleration, the problem being there is a GPU->CPU->GPU step slowing things down, will have to rework export such that it is performant in both Windows and MacOS while still giving the same look as preview.
• Working towards figuring out doing it the right way.
• Exporting time will always be longer than recording time. No editor will provide you realtime matching. That being said, there is a lot of room for improvement.
• Fixing this might take longer than expected.

[z0gSh1u]

Maybe rendering frames in parallel is a straightforward idea.

[siddharthvaddem]

Hey @z0gSh1u I actually thought about it and tried using Web Workers in JS to help with this but there was an issue with the shadow composting step and DOM API not apparently being available to the Web Worker.

I can assure you the code prioritized hardware acceleration if available and while testing it, it does use it.

After spending a lot of item on trying to fix this, I think the real issue is actually the seeking of frames sequentially in VideoExporter.ts and not the actual rendering, I might be doing it wrong and clearly have no idea on how to fix it. But hope this helps for someone looking into fixing it to make it faster. Some other interesting things that can be potentially looked into (Web workers, Offscreen Canvas, MediaBunny, VideoEncoder, VideoFrame). I hope someone figures this out and raises a PR 😢. Probably the biggest priority before adding any more features.

[cgisky1980]

It took over an hour for me to export a 8-minute video, so long that I fell asleep.

[siddharthvaddem]

Hence the issue haha. I would recommend folks to use it for short clips, for the time being.

[cgisky1980]

Hence the issue haha. I would recommend folks to use it for short clips, for the time being.

@siddharthvaddem

There are three solutions:

1. All use Canvas, no DOM rendering, encoding with ffmpeg.wasm (sound and multi-format can be saved).
2. Complete all clips via ffmpeg (the fastest but most difficult, translate the DOM render to the ffmpeg command).
3. You don't need to change anything, play it while editing, and record player area use another recording software 😆

[siddharthvaddem]

Yeah 2 would be significant rework as mentioned, 3 is big brain time haha. I'm not opposed to having a complete rework but that will take time.