42. How do we speed up rendering times in Doodly or does it really take this long to render a small file?

Short Answer:

Render the audio and video separately and then use a 3rd party software to combine them. See the section under this question named Other Rendering Discoveries for more details.

Try disabling the Internet prior to rendering the doodle to see if that speeds it up.

Note: Another doodler provided us with the following useful tidbit of information for figuring out preparation time. The average formula in the Film/TV industry is 3 minute edited content per 8 hours of filming / taping.

Example: A half an hour show is actually around 24 min, broken down to around 8 days of production time budget.

Technical Answer:

Techinese is needed to explain why these lengthy times happen and what you will run into when asking this question.

Rendering times in Doodly are not good in comparison with other software and I will explain why below. It is not unheard of to have a small doodle take a really long time to render. Doodly support and the Doodly Facebook group support will say “There are many factors that affect the exporting time, like the quality of the video, resolution, FPS, custom characters, multiple audios, the device you’re using, and internet connection. Please make sure that your internet connection is stable and try to close other applications while you’re exporting, this will allow your computer to allocate more resources into Doodly.”

Professional Observation:

In my professional and experienced opinion directly related to software programming, this reasoning is a copout for severely non-optimal programming. I am 100% certain that none of the support representatives have any direct experience related to software programming so they are reiterating what the developers tell them. If I use any other software other than Doodly which must convert the files to memory and then convert that to a .mp4 file, the render times for the other software are far superior and faster than Doodly in every test I’ve performed.

Experiments Performed:

Fast Internet and fast computer with a lot of memory and SSD’ sand Doodly will sometimes take 7 hours to render on that machine a small 10 scene doodle with custom compressed images, audio and other exit animation effects at 1920×1080 60FPS & 100% Quality.

If I create the same video in any other software with the same settings, it renders in under 10 minutes on the same machine so please do not tell me that it solely has to do with custom images, frames per second, internet speed, resolution and quality because that reasoning may be acceptable to other people that don’t know how to test but it is not acceptable to someone that does know how to test. A Doodly article states they suggest rendering at 1920×1080 60fps and 100% quality but then the excuse as to why it is slow is because you are rendering at 1920×1080 60fps and 100% quality which makes 0 sense.

<Techinese Warning>
All files are rendered directly into the memory of your computer. Memory is not hard drive storage. When you open a project in Doodly, that project downloads over the Internet from Bryxen servers directly to the memory of your computer and is stored in the memory of your computer as you edit the project. There is a very complex algorithm of memory conversion behind the editing process and the talking back of forth to the Bryxen servers that I won’t get into when you import items into Doodly and when you drag them onto the canvas and work with them. I will go as far as to say it is very impressive what happens in the background when you import an image and put it on the canvas.

Memory use severely increases when you add more audio tracks, additional assets onto the canvas, sound effects and more scenes. As memory usage increases based upon your doodle, the rendering process now has less memory to utilize when attempting to render the project so unless you have 64GB of memory in your computer, Doodly now has to fight itself and the other processes running on your computer for the rest of the memory usage.

In addition, there appears to be very minimalistic memory error checking as far as I can tell because there are a lot of buffer underrun and buffer overrun issues when rendering which is what causes a lot of these “bugs” in Doodly. If the programmers would look to see if a buffer overrun is happening when they program something then that would prevent a lot of the crashes that happen.

The reason all other software that I’ve tested renders faster is because they render the projects using the GPU or Graphics Processing Unit or the CPU or Central Processing Unit and not memory. Programs like Autocad and 3DS Max will pour their projects into memory before using the GPU or CPU to render them to make it faster. Doodly does not follow this same concept. Bryxen’s security measures for Doodly and their other products are top notch. They have every measure to ensure that the user or their competition cannot easily grab their products, assets, etc and to ensure that all your files as a user stays on their servers but that same over the top complex conversion process that renders everything directly from memory and that complex conversion process is the reason for the bottleneck for the render times. This is not going to change anytime soon so the render times will continue to be subpar in comparison to other software because of how the rendering is handled.

</Techinese Warning>

Other Rendering Discoveries:

I created a 151 scene doodle to have samples of the music inside Doodly outside of Doodly where people could send their clients to listen to and choose from the music clips.

I duplicated 151 scenes and changed the titles and times.

I dragged each audio file down and shortened it under the scenes.

Errors during testing:

Now, not taking into account the issues with Doodly being extremely laggy when you have a doodle that big, Doodly automatically duplicating and triplicating my scenes when I left the project and came back into the project, automatically moving my scenes from the 120th scene and placing it in the 1st scene spot messing up the alignment, Doodly not changing the text in the title after clicking Apply or OK to the point of where I had to change the same title text 7 or 8 times before it would accept it, the crashes that happened after 27 hours of rendering multiple times without any errors. requiring me troubleshooting the issue to figure out what was happening, here is what I discovered while I was troubleshooting those issues:

Video and Audio Rendering together:

Rendering Times started at About Infinity Hours left to Render. Not kidding. It was hilarious to see that. That ultimately worked its way down to 45 hours and slowly worked its way down to 32 hours. This ultimately crashed after 27 hours of rendering with no errors provided. This happened multiple times with different export configurations.

Video Rendering without Audio:

Rendering Time was 10 hours total without a crash.

Audio Rendering without Video (Same Audio Timeline):

All audio files on the same audio timeline. Crashed at 82% but this time provided me an error.

Audio Rendering without Video (Staggered):

I took the time to stagger each audio file by creating a second audio timeline and moving every other audio file to the next timeline below it. Rendered correctly in less than 8 minutes.

Audio and Video together took 32 hours to render.

Video by itself without audio took 10 hours to render.

Audio by itself took less than 8 minutes to render.

Note: This indicates that if you render your video without audio, your render times will be faster than rendering them together. Then render your audio with a blank scene. If you don’t have another program to combine these two files together, use one of the free programs I provide in question #5 of the Top 50 Doodly F.A.Q., “Where can I obtain free commercial use assets?”, to link both files together to speed up your Doodly rendering times.

How do render the audio separately from the video

Once you have the doodle prepared and ready to go and everything synced then follow these instructions.

a) Save the doodle.

b) Make some kind of minor movement to bring the save button back up as green and this time choose save as and save the doodle as the same name with – audio at the end of the name.

c) Open the – audio project. Delete all the scenes from that project.

d) Repeat b & c but this time name it – video.

e) Change the setting Ends When in the videos settings to When both audio and video end.

f) Now render the doodle as a .mp4 (You will have your audio only file).

g) Now open the – video project and delete all the audio files from that doodle.

h) Now Render that doodle as a .mp4. (You will have your video only file).

i) Combine both of those in a video editor like one of the packages I provide in question #5 of this Frequently Asked Questions.

j) Render the video and audio with that video editor.

Read our Troubleshooting Doodly written tutorial.