Premiere CS6's "Export Media" is one lazy bugger.

[Petri Teittinen]

So I've been testing Premiere Pro CS6 quite a bit recently, thanks to its unwillingness to use RED Rocket. While testing I noticed Premiere's "Export Media" feature is slow as molasses.

I mentioned in another thread I have installed some desktop monitoring gadgets to see what the CPU and GPUs are doing. While keeping a close eye on those, I ran an Export Media job (high fps 3K/4K/5K footage to NTSC DVD MPEG2, with maximum render depth and max render quality both disabled) and discovered why it takes my rather fast PC 35 minutes to export a 2-minute project: CPU is hardly used at all during Export and GPUs do nothing.

CPU usage pattern is especially telling: it stays practically idle for 80% of the time. Once every 5 seconds CPU use jumps to 15-20%, only to drop back down to idle right away. And according to monitoring gadgets, neither GPU is used at all: they remain at 0% all through the export.

Is your Export behaving the same way? How do you make Exports out of Premiere?

[Oliver Peters]

I would offer that you are debayering RED footage in the export and also encoding to a long GOP format. I'm not sure about CPU usage, but there is no way this process will be fast. If you generated uncompressed downsampled files in RCXP first and edited with these. Then generated an uncompressed master before creating the MPEG2 - you would see a world of difference in speed and performance.

Oliver

[Brian Merlen]

Well part of the whole point of using CS6 is the native editing ability, so I wouldn't fault him for cutting the files natively, that is the whole premiere incentive. The real question is why is a 64 bit application not using all the cores/ram at once during the export...

[Stephen Gentle]

That doesn't sound very good - when I have some time I'll see if mine does the same thing.

What is your storage doing though? It may be that the system is constantly waiting for IO (either just reading the source files, or possibly swapping memory if you don't have much RAM) in-between compressing frames...

[Petri Teittinen]

That doesn't sound very good - when I have some time I'll see if mine does the same thing.

Much appreciated, Stephen.

What is your storage doing though? It may be that the system is constantly waiting for IO (either just reading the source files, or possibly swapping memory if you don't have much RAM) in-between compressing frames...

32GB of RAM and storage is a 512GB SSD on a SATA6.0 channel with a read/write of approx. 300MB/sec. I don't think storage or RAM is the issue here.

[Olivier Madar]

On my mac Pro 2009, I had a big trouble during rendering with CS55. The rendering process began fast, then get slower and slower and only 1 core was left used. I was going crazy with this until i understood that the heat of the cores was the cause : Premiere use all the power of the cores and the temp increase in 5 to 10 minutes (i use a soft to monitor the temperature of the core). When a certain limit has reached, my computer stop using all the core. The problem is that the power don't come back until the next reboot. I changed the fan speed on the core to the maximum when i do rendering. Now, i have not this problem anymore. May be this can help.

Olivier

[Petri Teittinen]

The rendering process began fast, then get slower and slower and only 1 core was left used. I was going crazy with this until i understood that the heat of the cores was the cause

My water-cooled system is nowhere near overheating. And whenever Premier's Export uses the CPU, all cores show activity. Thanks for taking the time to reply, regardless!

[Oliver Peters]

Well part of the whole point of using CS6 is the native editing ability, so I wouldn't fault him for cutting the files natively, that is the whole premiere incentive. The real question is why is a 64 bit application not using all the cores/ram at once during the export...

I'm not faulting him for cutting native. I personally think it's false economy, especially if he has a Red Rocket that would transcode to an edit friendly format much faster ahead of time. But I agree that's part of the appeal of Premiere. 35 min. for a 2 min. piece isn't unreasonable and you'll see all sorts of posts around here with similar results. In fact, most are significantly slower. There is no free lunch. You can pay the "render tax" at the front end or the back end. Premiere puts it at the back. Should it export faster? Sure. Will it? Doubtful unless Adobe finds a way to integrate Red Rocket into the render.

- Oliver

[Olivier Madar]

I'm not faulting him for cutting native. I personally think it's false economy, especially if he has a Red Rocket that would transcode to an edit friendly format much faster ahead of time. But I agree that's part of the appeal of Premiere. 35 min. for a 2 min. piece isn't unreasonable and you'll see all sorts of posts around here with similar results. In fact, most are significantly slower. There is no free lunch. You can pay the "render tax" at the front end or the back end. Premiere puts it at the back. Should it export faster? Sure. Will it? Doubtful unless Adobe finds a way to integrate Red Rocket into the render.

- Oliver

Oliver, I usually render 1080p from quadHD timeline on my notebook at 1,5x the real time without the red rocket (and without checking full quality render box either). Here, on a high end computer, you can't accept 16x the time for rendering. There is something wrong.

Olivier

[Chris McKechnie]

Slow render export times for me as well even with the rocket. Diasppointed in Premier in that regard.