Please help! Easiest fastest render settings?

[cmsmatt]

Hi all,

I am cutting a feature that we shot, mostly at 4K, on a prosumer machine:

Intel Core 2 Quad 2.4g
8g RAM
Windows 7 x64

The project is currently at just under 110mins, and I am familiar with exporting HQ renders in h264, but I'm wondering if anyone has advice for the fastest possible draft quality render time, just for sound mixing reference.

I tried h264 at 480/24p (technically 720x300 since its an anamorphic frame), CBR @ 1mbps and it was coming in around 56 hours to render.

So I have several questions for you gurus out there:

Can I go further down on the bitrate without some kind of major image destruction?

Is there a better/faster/easier codec to utilize? Don't care about quality really, but it has to be readable so the sound mixer can see thats happening for sfx timing and dialogue syncing.

Should I not go through Media Encoder at all and just export directly from premiere?

Should I do the picture separately to the audio?

Should I break it up into smaller sections? (seems like a good option but might actually take longer cumulatively?)

Any other advice would help greatly, I heard WMV is a fast low-quality codec...any truth in that?

Thanks in advance!

[alexx_hg]

h264 is the worlds slowest encoder to render out*, wmv( mpeg2 main/high nearly the same) one of the fastest. Render at CBR max. 10Kbs quality 50/ complexity: simple, one pass. Nearly everyone can read it, even my soundguy with a mac gets a wmv. Off course I´ll give him an OMF file additionally.
What I noticed too is if you render i.e. from a 1080p timeline and scale in the mediaencoder to 720p or another size it needs extra time. Make a new sequenz with your final outputsize and render from there.

bg
alex

*without hardware accelerated support; even my QuadroFX with "elemental render engine" isn´t very faster with Red footage.

[Kujtim Ereqi]

Hi all,
Should I not go through Media Encoder at all and just export directly from premiere?
Thanks in advance!

There is no such option as exporting directly from Premiere. Media Encoder is the only option you have to export from Premiere. (unless you import the project in After Effects and render from there)

WMV is fine for you..

[Stefan Ringel]

"for sound mixing reference" ... just use Quicktime DV Pal. Its quick.
If you render a 4K Sequenze or 2K Sequenze as "1k" ... its getting slow, too.
If you want 1K video file... than you should render a 1k sequenze.
If you render dv-pal... open up a new "dv pal sequenze" and put the 4K sequenze in it.
So you render a "pal sequenze" as pal...

(excuse my bad english today ;)

[cmsmatt]

Thanks guys, yeah Kujtim sorry, my mistake, ha!

I'm starting to see the issue, it is crushing the 4k down to such a small size which is creating the issue, so in fact a small Bitrate is causing more problems than its solving?

Interesting...

What about a 512 sequence, I know its small but will that help then encoder?

Also, is there a way to get everything to default to 'scale to frame size'? Sometimes they already are set to that and sometimes they aren't, seems to be oddly random...

[Stefan Ringel]

Yes.. sometimes its 'scale to frame size', sometimes not. There is a button in the presettings where you can check 'scale to frame size'... but it doesn't work very well.

sure.. you can also render '512', but it depends on the codec you use. i would prefer DV Pal... for quick rendering.

If you create a new "sequence" you can drag and drop a 4K sequence into a new 1k secquence... than say "scale ro frame size"... and thats it. You don't have to copy the timeline into the new sequence.

[cmsmatt]

Okay so here's a very noobish question and i apologize in advance:

I noticed a lot of you were saying to render at max bit depth or max quality, wouldn't this slow down the render and/or make the file size larger?

OR is it that since it is essentially coming from such a high quality raw file, if you lower the quality, the system has to work harder to make it that quality. Seems kinda counter-intuitive but hey, that's technology for ya...

Any insight on this?

I rendered out a QT .MOV DV/NTSC 24P (not PAL cuz I'm in the US) at low quality, 720x480 sequence to 720x480 output and it was only about 5 hours of render time which was 10% of what I was getting, but the file is 23gigs! So its basically useless for playback cuz it bogs everything down. I was doing it at 10% quality though so if thats causing more problems than its solving please someone let me know.

Thanks all!

[Stefan Scherperel]

Copy and paste your files into a 512 sequence, and make sure that your clips are (scale to frame size). Export your sequence to wmv, set frame rate same as source. Set frame size 512x288. Set bitrate to 680kbps and image quality to 90. Set your encodig passes to 1 and bitrate mode to constant. Set your audio to windows pro 9.2 at 128kbps, 48kHz. That should render very quickly, be a descent file size for you and look fairly good.

[cmsmatt]

It's that time again!

So I followed everyone's advice before and it worked out great, 5 hour render, quality was manageable, etc. Thanks a lot for that!

Now however, I have since switched to CS5 and am trying to render a new cut for the same purpose...

It seems Media Encoder CS5 simply refuses to import anything from PPro any more. It will count up and up and up in the task manager (I have left it going for 10 hours, with everything pre-conformed, no crashes or errors, and still nothing) but never appear in AME as a renderable project. Smaller, far simpler projects do work fine.

The only solution is to use After FX and I import the project into AEX, then export using AME, simplest settings as mentioned here, bam, 80 hour render time no matter what settings I use...

Does anyone know why PPro will no longer directly export and if there is a way to get AEX running faster? Is anyone with CS5 having this same problem?

[Uli Plank]

Something must be wrong here, I can render fine from PPro CS5.