07/05/2026
This is the descriptive of the studio antennas generated from a new graphics function I added to our video production system. The premise of this was as the video progresses, a leader box with text description of the selected antenna will display in a 3D text format.
And this is where this project came to a complete stop.
The video I chose to overlay was just a 1 minute clip from the view shown. Using my fastest PC, an I9 3.2Ghz with 128GB for processing was at first going to take 22 hours to complete. No biggie.
When I woke up this morning and checked the progress. This estimate had grown to 16 days and 8 hours at only 3% progress. The system had also generated massive temporary swap files during the process. One overlay file was 126GB, another at 97GB, huge files to written and read only once then deleted when the next temp was created from them. Anyway, the system was processing it, the clock was ticking down and files were being written. I did not want to fight or deal with it for 16 days on the primary workstation. So, I stopped it.
I'll move this over to the backup PC and start it again just to see the final results later. With that said, I did get a healthy respect for CGI overlays from this experiment as we have the process capacity to process 3D CGI over raw video and sufficient space to store it. The only limiting factor is the time to process it. For the record, we now have 6 TB available for onsite local processing and project storage.
It's something to think about when it comes to what we watch today that may have CGI and the why it takes so long between installments of any given show. 🤓