Exporting Files Faster?

thefilmaddict

thefilmaddict

Veteran
My Boss owns a:

2019 Mac Pro,
96 GB RAM,
AMD Radeon Pro 580X 8 GB Graphics card,
3.5ghz 8 Core Processor Intel.

He edits instructional videos in Adobe Premiere Pro in 4K. The videos are usually over an hour long.

He exports the final file using the Vimeo 1080p preset in Media Encoder.

He's tired of spending hours of his life making output files. Is there anything he could buy to speed up the process?

He talked about upgrading his system or possibly getting a second computer to do processing. We really have no idea what the best solution is and how it would work. Any ideas?

Thank you for your help!
 
Per usual, more power across the board...and new power.

GPU - CPU - RAM --> some software will use it more than others but it's all good to have.

There are also encoder/decoder boxes (like from Matrox) that could be worth a shot if the budget is limited.
 
I think the Vimeo preset exports to h.264.

Make sure AME hardware encoding is switched on.

If it's exporting to h.264 or h.265, maybe try ProRes 422 HQ. That should encode a lot faster (but try a comparison test with a 5-10min sequence).
Vimeo accepts all those formats. The ProRes file will be a lot bigger, but if you have a fast internet connection, that could be a reasonable tradeoff.

Is Adobe encoding to h.264 still faster on Nvidia GPUs than AMD GPUs?

https://vimeo.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/360056550451-Video-and-audio-compression-guidelines
 
Those encoder/decoders are for running video through them and then they create compressed files in real time, right? Since he's editing all of his material, it's not a live event, that probably wouldn't help, right?

The Mac he has can be upgraded by a lot. For media encoder to run the fastest, would he want to upgrade GPU, CPU and RAM, or just concentrate more in one area?

Also, can multiple Macs be linked together to attack different tasks?
 
I belive he's making h.264 mp4 1080 files. A hour long ProRes 422 HQ file would be huge of course, but I bet it would export faster. Upload time would be brutal. I'll double check that he's doing this: Make sure AME hardware encoding is switched on.
 
If you all have gigabit internet, get it. It really changed the way I work.

Also, my comment about GPUs was leaning towards: Perhaps a Windows machine, and some shared storage (or just sneaker net) would be a reasonable purchase. Windows 10 is pretty good. We run both macOS and Win10; switching between the two, esp on Adobe apps, isn't so bad...
 
There's hardware that specializes in real-time conversions such as capture cards, but the boxes I'm talking about are faster than that. I don't know if they even still sell them anymore though.

They do have cards: https://www.matrox.com/en/video/products/broadcast-media/h264-codec-cards/m264

"The M264 family can encode/decode up to four streams of 4Kp60 at 4:2:2 10-bit, 40 streams of HD Long GOP at 4:2:2 10-bit or 64 streams of HD at 4:2:0 8-bit. The faster than real-time encoding/decoding ability of the M264 allows multiple blazing fast transcodes for distribution on different media platforms."

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4K ProRes files - the decent quality ones like 422 or HQ - could be over 100GBs for over one hour. (LT might work.)

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Check out some M1 YouTube videos. Pretty astonishing differences compared to Intel Macs. Might be worth grabbing a few Mac Minis.

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Yes, you can set up a render farm with multiple Macs (I did this in Compressor), but even one or two extra M1s might be a better route for the future.
 
He's exporting to 1080p, right? So depending on frame rate, etc, the files will be 75-100GB/hour.

My internet connection is 960Mbps down, 980Mbps up. 100GB should take about 15 minutes to upload.
I'm not bragging; I didn't build that out. I have service through Sonic.com, a neighbor through AT&T; we both have basically the same speeds (but each over their own wires; they're not sharing those). As soon as it's available to your home or studio, get it. It's really really changed my work.

The Mac M1 Mini is a good idea. The h.265 render speeds of this low-end chip aren't super fast, esp compared to a Mac Pro. But geez, they're so cheap. And with an AME watch folder, shared storage, etc. it could be a really good way to go if you don't want to dive into the Windows world. So perhaps no faster than your boss's Mac Pro, but his computer will be freed up...
 
There are tests on YouTube showing the M1 exporting H.265 faster than 28-core MacPros with W5700Xs and similar company.

(A lot of the Intel hardware isn't optimized for certain H.265 decoding so MacPros can be useless with it.)

The ones I saw were in FCPX so I don't know about Media Encoder.

___

One trick I have done over the years is let QuickTime transcode my 4K files to HD. It's an extra step and theoretical quality loss (no one will notice), but the 4K --> HD is very fast.
 
I haven't seen the YouTube tests, but I'm as interested in the new Apple-Silicon Macs as the next guy. So there is this from last month:

M1 MacBook Pro vs 2019 Mac Pro
compressor.jpg
[I don't know much about the BruceX benchmark, but considering that the renders took under 70 seconds, I'm guessing it's not a one-hour video. :) So I don't know how those tests will scale).
Specs:
2019 Mac Pro Duo = 2019 Mac Pro, 3.3GHz 12-Core Xeon W CPU, 96GB RAM, Pro Vega II Duo GPU, macOS Big Sur 11.2.1
M1 MacBook Pro = 2020 Apple M1 MacBook Pro 13-inch, 8-Core CPU, 16GB RAM, 8-core GPU, macOS Big Sur 11.2.1

Conclusion:
The 8-core M1 MacBook Pro beat or tied the 2019 Mac Pro 12-core in two tests (Motion and Lightroom). The 2019 Mac Pro was superior in all other tests.

The "Universal" and "Intel, Rosetta" notation indicates the state of the apps running in the M1 MacBook Pro.
Click to expand...
https://barefeats.com/m1-versus-2019-mac-pro.html

And couple months ago, a friend who owns a design studio with very impressive clients tried out a M1 Mini with the (then beta) Apple-Silicon version of Resolve:
"3840x3840px (ie ~5k) with 20 secondaries. M1 mini = 9:21. 16” MBP intel = 4:33. Over 2x slower!"
(He was using his MBP because he was at home and didn't want to install beta software on his main work systems).

That's not my sort of real-world work, but it is his. He also tried out After Effects rendering on a M1 Mini and compared to his 16-inch MBP. Basically, the mini was faster with a single core, but slower as the AE comp was rendered on more cores... The Intel CPU was faster and faster the more cores were added (he used RenderGarden, btw: https://www.toolfarm.com/buy/rendergarden/ ). I don't recall the exact numbers and can't find them at the moment.

But that's with a really inexpensive M1 Mini, and After Effects running under Apple's Rosetta 2 translator. Both AE and Adobe Media Encoder (and most other Adobe apps) aren't yet released in native Apple-Silicon versions. The M1 Mini will probably perform better when they are. https://helpx.adobe.com/download-install/kb/apple-silicon-m1-chip.html

A friend who develops software for the MG/VFX world (which these days also includes YouTubers) thinks the M1 Mini is impressive for the price, but he wasn't thrilled by the GPU performance. Better than low-end Intel Macs with integrated graphics, but not than Macs with discrete GPUs.

Everyone I know thinks Apple Silicon is going to be great. But they're feeling like there's a bit of hype about what the first M1 Macs can do in the real world (well, our part of the real world).

But you know, a $1100 Mac (with 16GB RAM) that doesn't trail much-more-expensive Intel Macs by a whole lot? That's pretty damn cool.

And the next Apple-Silicon Macs? Hopefully we'll know more soon. But in the meantime, we have work to do...
https://buyersguide.macrumors.com/#mac

So I agree with your that a M1 Mini is worth TFA considering as an option.

PS- NorBro and everyone: Corrections, pushback, different viewpoints more than welcome.
 
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Would it be worth it for him to buy:

Apple M1 Chip with 8-Core CPU and 8-Core GPU with 512GB Storage for $899?

Then connect that to his current Mac using an ethernet cable? What would be his workflow to take advantage of both computers? Would 1 run adobe premiere pro and the other media encoder? Would he have to first export from premiere pro a pro res file 422 then put that into media encoder? Would both computers share a media drive?

Just trying to understand this.
 
There are multiple answers to these questions...Google and watch YouTube.

You will understand everything better by seeing people's workflows/explanations.

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In short, if the computers are working together for the rendering they need to work in the same piece of software. (But you are running two completely different systems with each other so compatibility issues need to be researched.)

Even if they cannot work together to "export files faster", having another workstation on the side should be beneficial.

If you cannot install everything on the new M1 for post-production, you can export a ProRes file from the MP, transfer it to the new computer (Ethernet or hard drive or wireless), and do the transcoding on there while the MP continues to edit.

If you're finding that the MP takes too long to export a ProRes the file and the workflow is still taking up time then you'll have to edit on the new computer as well.

[Again, this is only if you cannot have them work together to transcode your files or don't need to work on an extra computer on the side while the file is made.]
 
NorBro said:
One trick I have done over the years is let QuickTime transcode my 4K files to HD. It's an extra step and theoretical quality loss (no one will notice), but the 4K --> HD is very fast.
Click to expand...

+1 Exactly.

I find the process of a dual encode is often quicker than trying to push out an H.264 from your NLE. Depending on client requirements I either push out a Prores or Cineform master, this goes quite quickly, then encode in Handbrake or Vidcoder to deliver a hgh quality MP4 file that can be either 8 or 10-bit and either 264 or 265 flavor. I always like to have a 'master' file encoded to something like Prores or Cineform to come back to if I need to do further encodes to further flavor files for BD, DVD or any other particular device. Have never believed in doing a major edit and not creating a master file. Depending on the source I often find going via Prores or Cineform and then going to x264 yields a better result, especially at low bit rates than going from the timeline to the basic H.264 encoder in many NLE's. I've tried a number of times to match the dual step encode to x264 quality out of Handbrake to the direct H.264 out of Premiere, Adobe Media Encoder,r Main Concept's Total Code Studio or Compressor. In the bulk of instances, the two-step master to x264 encode in most cases beats an H.264 encoded from the timeline at similar bit-rates.

Chris Young
 
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