Export slows down after a while

[Walter Soyka]

[Albert Kowalski] “It it a Premiere Pro composition with several dynamic links. Project has a lot of keylight’s, noise reducing and different effects. A lot of layers on top of each other. But that is not a problem in the beginning… when I export my project in Premiere Pro it starts very well, frames are encoded pretty fast. But after 30 minutes it starts to slow down to the moment it gets reeeealy slow. It won’t speed up until I restart the program (not the whole PC). “

I’d suggest you try Premiere’s new Render and replace feature [link].

[Albert Kowalski] “The other strange thing is my export does not occupy my GPU at all (the usage is 0%) and I have a GPU that is CUDA supported in Premiere Pro. “

Premiere Pro > File > Project Settings
If your renderer is set to Software Only, Pr will not use the GPU.

Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
@keenlive   |   RenderBreak [blog]   |   Profile [LinkedIn]

[Albert Kowalski]

Unfortunately there is no Render and Replace in CS6 🙁

And of course I use GPU acceleration in preferences. That doesn’t change anything.

[Walter Soyka]

[Albert Kowalski] “Unfortunately there is no Render and Replace in CS6 :(“

Yeah, that’s new in CC 2014.

In Ae CS6 (and many versions prior), you can render via the render queue and in your output module settings, check “Include project link.” Import the media into Pr, and replace the dynamically-linked comp. If you need to make changes, you can right-click the movie clip in Pr’s project panel and choose “Edit original.” This will open up the AEP that rendered the movie in Ae.

(I am trying to help you separate the Ae portion of the project from the Pr portion to try to improve your performance. I don’t love dynamic link in cases like this because it always renders without multiprocessing.)

Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
@keenlive   |   RenderBreak [blog]   |   Profile [LinkedIn]

[Albert Kowalski]

Not the best way, but I understand that is one option. But how can I investigate what causes the problem?

[Walter Soyka]

[Albert Kowalski] “Not the best way, but I understand that is one option. But how can I investigate what causes the problem?”

That’s what I’m suggesting you do. Troubleshooting is about stripping the variables in a system, then methodically adding them back in. The problem could be with Ae, dynamic link, or Pr. This should help determine where in that chain the issue is.

Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
@keenlive   |   RenderBreak [blog]   |   Profile [LinkedIn]

[Albert Kowalski]

I think I found a solution. It looks like After Effects which is working in the background causes the problems. I tried to kill the AfterFX.exe process in Task Manager to see what happens. I did it when I noticed my export started to be very slow. AE occupied around 7 GB of RAM. After the kill, AE restarts itself (or Media Composer does that) and it slowly gains the previous RAM. What is great, the export stops just for few seconds, waiting for AE to return to it previous state. But fortunately after this action, render speeds up. I just need to restart AE every hour to make sure it doesn’t stuck. So I created a simple batch file:

@echo off
taskkill /f /im AfterFX.exe
:exit

saved it as KillAE.bat and set the Task to run the file every hour. Thanks to that it is fully automated and the export works like a charm 🙂