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Cs6 slow to export X264 in win 8.1
Hi all. NEWB here. PLEASE Don’t run. LOL! I recently started using Cs6 and edited a clip then exported but it took over 11 mins to render/export a 2m26s video in X264 vfw at 720×480. Unfortunately the default mplayer viewing size is too small at 720 (I’m producing training videos using desktop screen captures with audio so the end user has to just be able to click on the video and it opens at a decent size). I went back and rendered again at 1080×720. That took 20 minutes for a 2m26sec clip!
The source was 2 clips already edited in avidemux (from desktop captures using camstudio) and the clips were rendered as X264 in an AVI container. I also had them saved as HuffyUv / AVI but Cs6 didn’t like that type of source file so I had to use the X264 source clips.
All I did was import my 2 clips…then SNAP them together with NO effects and render/export. I DID check off high quality and blend frames so maybe one or both is causing it to take longer?
I can likely get away without the Hi Quality setting or frame blend if either or both are what’s causing such long render time. Quality isn’t critical as it doesn’t lose too much because the text on the screen captures has to be readable.The videos aren’t always going to be this short and a 10min video could take an hour and a half or more to render if I can’t speed things up. Funny thing is as buggy as avidemux is…it renders the same video to x264 in about 30 seconds! I always thought rendering was rendering time wise given the same codec. Maybe not?
MY OS is windows 8.1pro. Workstation is a DELL with Intel 4790 cpu 8GB ram and Nvidia GT720 video card. Not super high end but should be sufficient for what I’m doing. Do I need more ram or a better video card…or is there a way to hand off the actual rendering to the video card instead of the CPU? Or am I missing something simple here that will help speed things up?
Any suggestions will be greatly appreciated.
Thanks
Dave -
5 Replies
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Your times are not extraordinary. Encoding to h.264 and x264 are very CPU intensive. If you need them to encode faster you either need a new computer with dual Xeon processors, or a dedicated hardware encoder, such as a Matrox HD Compress card, which typically encodes 5 to 6 times faster.
David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Colorist
David Weiss ProductionsDavid is a Creative COW contributing editor and a forum host of the Apple Final Cut Pro forum.
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Thanks for the fast reply. I’m a bit dis-illusioned though. I figured a quad core Devils Canyon at 3.6ghz/4turbo and 8gb of ram would chew away at most encoding jobs pretty quickly.
Both Avidemux and Handbrake chew up and spit out the same X264 encode/recode job on this system in under a minute which is why I’m confused as to why professional software like Premiere would be so slow given the same x264 codec. I wish avid was more stable because it’s fine for what I’m doing but it crashes too much and does weird things sometimes.
Ok…so …if Premiere is going to encode slowly to X264…what codec would you recommend using for export that would render my edits much faster? Then I can re-code that output in handbrake at mega speed.
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[Dave Michaels] “Both Avidemux and Handbrake chew up and spit out the same X264 encode/recode job on this system in under a minute which is why I’m confused as to why professional software like Premiere would be so slow given the same x264 codec.”
Because as far as I know Premiere doesn’t officially support x264.
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Don’t screen capture using the h.264 or x264 codec, instead use a high performance codec such as Apple Pro Res or Avid DNX.
David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Colorist
David Weiss ProductionsDavid is a Creative COW contributing editor and a forum host of the Apple Final Cut Pro forum.
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Found the problem. The reason for the slow export/render was I had checked the Render Max Quality button. I unchecked it and rendered the 2m26sec 1080×720 edited sequence in about 1m30sec. With the Render max quality button checked it took 20mins for the same sequence. I don’t need max quality for desktop capture/video tutorials and it still looks great even with normal quality.
BTW…capturing the desktop is not done in x264. It’s done with camstudio using the camstudio lossless codec. Don’t think I mentioned that above. I do have another CS6 question but it’s completely different issue so I’m going to start a new topic.
Thanks for the assist on this one.
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