Rendering performance tips

E

eco_bach

Well-known member
Hi
For my latest 6minute film I'm using dynamic rendering, doing all my CC in AE. Rendering times are LONG! (Over 8 hrs on average) Invested in the latest iMac this past summer (27" 3.4GHz Intel Core i7 with 16GB RAM) thinking it would provide me with plenty of power and speed for editing and rendering. Can't say I'm happy with the performance overall. Can anyone recommend any performance tips to help speed up rendering besides the obvious ones of not using CPU intensive effects?
 
Get an even bigger monitor..maybe that will help..JK.

Aside from CPU intensive effects things that effect rendering include:

How many CPU cores your computer has
If it's using your GPU to assist in the rendering
How many video tracks you have
What resolution the source footage is (I find that high resolution photos really slow down premiere)
Frame rate - higher frame rate = more frames to render
The tool you use for CC can really have an effect on rendering as well. For instance, magic bullet v.s. standard premiere CC is a world apart in speed.
The codec you render too and the codec you render from both play a roles in the speed
Video previews are another story entirely, there are settings that effect video preview speed as well.
 
Are you saying you are Dynamically Linked from Premiere to AEFX?

Try exporting an Intermediate from AEFX instead of exporting from PPRO.


TIP - export a section as a trial.
 
i work on premiere pro cs5.5 and ae
and the export is quite a problem
in after effects the only solution ,and i travelled a lot on the net to know that, is animation codec and quick time
this is the best solution to have the best video .
the files will be uncompressed
then you can chose sorenson squeeze to finalize your project or episode pro
i think that sorenson is the best

that's my point of view
i think that i'll export from premiere to ae and then animation and quick time and then sorenson that's actually the best solution i found
 
Here are 5 things (that you can control) that will essentially affect render/export speed. (Assuming youre using CS5 or above). I've noticed that Premiere seems to be easier optimized on a well-built PC. (Nvidia cards, 64bit, etc) Not sure why that is.

1) Graphics card.
It's got to be fast, at least 1.5 if not 2 gigs memory and at least DDR3.
If it's not the specified NVIDIA card (or a hacked NVIDIA) that enables Adobe Mercury Playback Engine (accelerated graphics) then you will not be able to take full advantage of what makes Premiere and AE a beast.

2) Processor/Cores.
i7 with at least 4 cores is recommended for speed. Again without Mercury, the Adobe products won't take advantage of all your cores.

3) Dynamic Link vs. Intermediates
For the most part, dynamic link works really really well. Importing an AE file into Premiere and exporting goes alot quicker than exporting from AE. I recommend this route. Right click a clip in your Premiere timeline you want to send to AE, and select "replace with AE composition." The clip will open in AE. Do you effects. Switch to Premiere, and the clip will reflect your work in AE. Render your final from Premiere, not AE. Try a test clip both ways and see which is faster.

4) Plugins. If you're using Magic Bullet or other 3rd party codecs....it's way slow and doesn't utilize AME. Using the stock effects in AE, especially the ones optimized for CUDA, are a dream.

5) Codec.
AVCHD is hard on Premiere, because it has a tremendous about of uncompressing to do. You might want to transcode a clip to Prores or Avid DNxHD as a test to see if you can use that footage easier. But still, it shouldn't be THAT much difference.

Basically do some test exports trying out different things until you find what works well for you. On my system (which is optimized as explained above), a 30 minute 1080p video with heavy third-party plugins/color takes about 2 hours to export.
 
Another thing to keep in mind, and this going to sound counterintuitive, is to render out at the same resolution as your source footage instead of trying to do a lower res export. While compression will take longer, it seems to take even longer to do a high quality downscale.

Also, in my experience while dynamic link is great for speeding up your workflow, I've found that rendering things through it (like having AE comps in Premiere) is always slower than rendering an intermediate. I mostly just use dynamic link to get clips into AE (via copy-paste, not replace clip) and then render an intermediate and bring that back into Premiere. I only use dynamically linked comps for short videos where the extra render time isn't significant.

And then one last thing...try exporting an uncompressed version of your sequence (like to Quicktime Animation codec, or something similar) and see how long it takes purely to render the timeline. If it doesn't seem nearly as bad, you might want to consider using another tool to do the actual video compression. x264 is the fastest and best H264 encoder (you'll want to find a good GUI for it), it's just a bit more of a hassle to export from Premiere and then do the compression and muxing separately.
 
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