Blender Stops Responding (the script takes a long time to finish)

[mikeycal]

If you are creating a stopwatch or timer overlay for a lot of frames (10,000+), blender's interface may stop responding but the script is still running - let it finish.

I did a Worst Case Scenario test to see just how long it could take to create timestamps for the maximum number of frames supported by Blender - 300,000.

My settings for the test:

1. Default script settings
2. Blender Resolution: 1920 x 1080
3. Blender Frame Rate: 23.98 fps
4. Start Frame: 1
5. End Frame: 300,000

I performed my test on an Intel i5 3570K (4 cores) 3.4Ghz processor, and the script took 10 hours and 38 minutes to run the script with all 300,000 frames - creating time stamps from 00:00:00.000 to 03:28:32.500

The one problem with blender is that it only runs the Python script with 1 CPU core. So the script only uses 25% of my CPU's potential - this is an issue with blender itself.

The good news is that, after the timestamps are created for each frame, you can save the .blend file and reuse it. It will work for any video that has the same Frame Rate.