Premiere Cs5.5 Render time Takkeees tooo Looonnng

[Johnny Friday]

So...survey says? one NO and two YES....well, one would assume if making your MATER copy...you want MAX everything.

[Kyle Prohaska]

This is one area where FCPX comes in handy for me on short projects. I realize mentioning FCPX is like pouring salt in a wound for some folks, but the final output compared to CS5.5 or CS6 is far better. It's amazing to me just how streamlined the exporting in FCPX is compared to other programs. I suppose I shouldn't be shocked, because Apple is writing that software for use on their own hardware.

Either way, I've always been frustrated with Adobe's output times, even on things rendering 1080p. I have a MacPro 3rd on the list speed wise (8-Core 2.93Ghz, 26GB RAM, etc.), the fastest you can get without going 12-Core. Even so, rendering feels very tedious at times. I suppose we're all just spoiled? ;)

40x render speeds or even 20x sounds crazy to me though, I couldn't get anything done with a wait time like that. Glad I'm still working in 1080p for most things.

[Johnny Friday]

I can say UNEQUIVOCALLY that i will move back to FCP if these problems persist with Adobe and FCP comes up with reading R3d's natively...No question that Adobe has and opportunity here...but as a working person, you can only spend so much time on renders and slow processing etc.....Some may have luck, but i'd say there is a growing majority of folks running into bugs and long render times etc...as they dig into real world projects....NO WAY i can wait 24hour for renders or even worse.....try to scrub in the timeline over clips that can't keep up even when i have $5500 in graphics cards stuffed inside my mac.

I'm pleased to hear others can edit a feature film on their laptops, but i can barely make it through a clip with 4-5 effects added.

[Johnny Friday]

FASTER RENDER TIMES:
So, for me....(this may not be same for you)...i had set my Memory control to "MEMORY" within preferences---as i was recommended (by a pop-up window in Adobe) to do this after checking a max or hi setting some place on a clip--i don't recall where. I did this recently and after doing so, my render times went from 24hours to 52 or more hours....I had not caught this until now...BUT, i went back into my preferences and set the Memory setting to "PERFORMANCE" and now my render times have come back to what they originally were---not what i would like to see nor acceptable. BUT, 50 hours for a 52min timeline was bordering on "revolution"....24hours is more along the lines of I'll take it if i have to until i find a better solution.

[Craig Parkes]

Here is a key argument for transcoding up front versus realtime performance.

If you know your client is going to make creative changes up until the last possible minute, no matter how much you tell them that you need a day plus to master the footage, then real time performance is a HUGE problem when you don't know the actual render times at the end of the show.

This is especially true in a client supervised edit - where clients, even news journalists who do this every day, seem to forget that outputting things once an edit is finished generally is going to take at least realtime duration of the project (in some rare instances faster, but in others not so much.)

If you aren't getting fast enough output times on your deliverables editing R3D's natively, then you have to consider where in the chain you can afford to spend the time rendering, and how much overall that time affects your deliverable schedule, because while all parts of an edit are not equal.

For my money workflows like Avid's, where you can AMA link, choose your selects, get a rough together, do an assembly without transcoding, THEN transcode your footage to the format you want to offline with, and continue editing seamlessly on a new timeline within the same project of an automatically rebuilt transcoded timeline, and then output makes by far the most sense given the current state of hardware.

BUT, Avid's big hurdle is currently not being able to even create a 4K timeline. Adobe may promise realtime editing, but unless your machine can approach realtime encoding at output then the realtime performance is in some ways just moving the bottleneck later in your workflow. That may save time overall, but the value of time as you approach a deadline is significantly greater than the value of time when you start a project - because clients often make up their minds late and then change them even later. Figuring out where to spend your time doing what as part of a workflow has a lot more variables than what will allow you to get editing fastest. Saving time at the beginning of the process means nothing if you are missing deadlines at the end (even when it's the clients fault the deadline was missed, the association of you failing to meet it can hurt your relationship, and you can't blame your tools if they meet your needs, but not your clients - your tools need to work for your clients needs as well as yours.)

No reason to shun Adobe though, Adobe Media Encoder is meant to be pretty fast at transcoding footage, so you can fit this workflow into their software as well, it just might not be as well managed as Avid, or as behind the scenes as FCPX presumably will try and be.

[Michel Rabe]

What exactely takes so long, debayering? Without Red Rocket that should be all CPU or does Mercury Engine give some to GPU? I'm trying to understand the bottleneck.
From the manuals, footage, scratch disc and output folder should ideally be on 3 different harddiscs, with footage and scratch disc needing the fastest possible. Could that be another bottleneck here?

[Brad Allen]

Just finished up some testing to see if I could replicate some of the long export times mentioned in this thread. Short answer - I couldn't really on a current system.

I started with 4k footage from Scarlet and loaded 1 minutes worth onto a 4k timeline. I then spat a 1080p 1 Pass h.264 MP4 out from the system. I tested with max render quality vs non max render quality - with GPU vs without GPU - with a three way colour corrector vs without and all the combinations thereof.

Export Settings and Times (Minutes:Secs)

Max Render Quality (Full Debayer)
(1) 4K > 1080 > h.264, 1 Pass VBR, Max Render Quality, GPU, No Effects = 16:50
(2) 4K > 1080 > h.264, 1 Pass VBR, Max Render Quality, GPU, ThreewayCC = 16:52
(3) 4K > 1080 > h.264, 1 Pass VBR, Max Render Quality, No-GPU, No Effects = 25:16
(4) 4K > 1080 > h.264, 1 Pass VBR, Max Render Quality, No-GPU, Threeway = 24:30


Non Max Render Quality (1080p Debayer)
(5) 4k > 1080 > h.264, 1 Pass VBR, Non Max Render Quality, GPU, No Effects = 2:42
(6) 4k > 1080 > h.264, 1 Pass VBR, Non Max Render Quality, GPU, Threeway = 2:42
(7) 4k > 1080 > h.264, 1 Pass VBR, Non Max Render Quality, No-GPU, No Effects = 3:09
(8) 4k > 1080 > h.264, 1 Pass VBR, Non Max Render Quality, No-GPU, Threeway = 4:03


As you can see, not using max render quality dramatically reduces export times and I would encourage those folks who are simply doing draft outputs for client approvals/changes to keep this in mind for your output settings. The other interesting factor is the difference that the GPU made in the full debayer tests (see test (1) vs test (3)). I put this down to downscaling of the 4k image to 1080p being offloaded to the GPU.

It also worth pointing out that no RedRocket has been used in these exports. Specs of the system are as follows so you guys can see that the machine I'm using isn't ridiculously soup'd up:

Intel Core i7 950 (3.07ghz) - Quad Core CPU
Gigabyte X58-UDR3 Motherboard
24gb Kingston DDR3 RAM
NVIDIA EVGA GTX570 1280mb GPU

My guess for John (the OP), is that your render times are so long because you are running on a Core 2 Duo system that also does not have a GPU that will help accelerate your workflow. The Core2Duo micro-architecture dates back to 2006 which is a fairly long time ago in computer years. If you are also rendering with max quality checked - I think your export times are actually looking about where they should be.

[Subhadip Sen]

Brad has covered everything. Render times are no issue, you just need to choose the right computer hardware. The Conroe / Core 2 microarchitecture lack SSE 4.2 instructions without which Max Render Quality totally kills performance (same applies for old AMD Phenom processors) over and above the otherwise archaic performance. Ideally, you would want a CUDA accelerated GPU for Max Render Quality - not only does it massively speed up render times, but also renders better quality scaling through the Lanczos algorithm. Particularly for laptops, the GPU makes a significant impact. I would recommend the new Thinkpad W530 configured with Quadro 2000M - pretty much the perfect portable laptop for Premiere. 4K to 1080 (1080 debayer) was real-time on the Thinkpad W520, should be faster than real-time on the W530.

[Stefan Scherperel]

After having used CS4, CS5, CS5.5 and now CS6 with red footage, I have figured out some things along the way in reguards to render times.
1. MAX RENDER QUALITY with red footage means that it is debyering at 4K or 5K depending on your original footage size. This takes a really long time.
2. Output settings vs timeline settings. I have found that I get the best quality and fastest encode if my timeline settings and output settings match (For RED FOOTAGE). If you know you are outputting 1080P, work in a 1080P RED Preset timeline, or copy and paste your timeline to those settings before output. Also then make sure that Max render is not checked. If it is checked you will be rendering at 4K and then High quality scaling to 1080P. The footage may look oh so slightly different (not really better) when rendering at max quality, but to me and my clients 1/4 to 1/8th the render time does not otherwise justify it.
If you have graphics that need to be rendered, I would suggest rendering these first at max render quality back to your timeline. Max render quality just improves the scaling algorithms so if you are not scaling anything you will not see a difference.
I can usually render out a 30 sec commercial at 1080P (RED 4K native footage) in about 2 or 3 minutes (just basic color correction)
My specs
Core i7 920
24GB RAM
Non raid ESATA Drives