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Extremely Long Render Times in Premier Pro CC 2014 – Please guide me!!
Hello,
Let me start off by saying I am new to premier, forums, and video editing for the most part.
My content comes from (2) GoPro Hero 4 cameras set at 4k and a Sony FDR-AX100, also set at 4k.
MY PROBLEM (well hopefully the one you can help me with)
I import the content into Premier Pro CC 2014 (which is all up to date) applying color correction, fades, and titles. When I try to playback the files even with all effects turned off my computer will not do it. I need to first render preview files. So I select my in and out points and try to render but it takes, DAYS to complete. For example: A 3 minute selection on the timeline will take 70 hours to render the preview files. After it renders, I make a few more adjustments and let my computer render for a few more days.
I must be doing something wrong. Any help would be greatly appreciated!
MY SETUP:
I use the Nvidia CUDA architecture as my playback engine in Premier.
Premier is installed on my internal drive. The footage & project files are kept on a WD VelociRaptor Thunderbolt Drive and my preview files are set to a second WD VelociRaptor Thunderbolt Drive.
My preferences are set to use up to 12 gigs of ram for Premier, leaving the other 20 for other applications. It is optimized for Memory. I have tried most all combinations of ram setting here with little luck. (again, I’m new and don’t know what I’m doing.)
My Premier sequence is set to be 1080p & my sequence settings are set to a width & height of 960 x 540 with the program monitor set at 1/4 quality.
All the above and I can’t even play a file. I have nothing else open or running and have stopped everything that would normally run in the background at startup (like the iTunes helper).
Anywho. Thanks for taking the time to read all the above. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Warm regards,
Alex -
9 Replies
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Hi Alex,
Unfortunately, that’s the nature of 4K H.264. It’s just that processor intensive and the iMac is fairly limited when it comes to processing. The way GoPro compresses the footage also seems to be much worse than other cameras when it comes to playback. Then you add color correction and downconversion and you might have well take a short vacation.
My advice would be to throw all your raw footage into Media encoder and convert to ProRes, then start editing.
Vince Becquiot
San Francisco Bay Area
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Thanks for the info, Vince.
I did notice, in many other forums, the GoPro being a common denominator when it came to painfully slow rendering.
I put all my projects in Media Encoder to export for YouTube at 1080p. In hind site, I think that’ll thin things out, but it may be a bit to extreme. This was before I saw your reply. I’ll try the ProRes.
Thanks again,
Alex -
Yes, definitely Prores over H.264. Not only will you retain full quality, but It’s much better for color correction. It’s also kinder to processing.
Vince Becquiot
San Francisco Bay Area
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[Vince Becquiot] “but It’s much better for color correction”
It might run better when it is Prores but it doesn’t add anything to the data it already has. 8-bit footage doesn’t magically become 10-bit footage when transcoding.
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[Alex Frizzell] “When I try to playback the files even with all effects turned off my computer will not do it.”
You should know that you should bring down your playback quality in the source and program monitors to something like 1/4 instead of ‘full’ which it might be on. Then at least your playback experience should be fine.
If you don’t know what I’m talking about, look on the bottom right side of either the Source or Program window and you should see something that says “full”, “1/2”, “1/4”, etc. If it is full or half, then bring it down to 1/4 and it should help your playback experience. What this does is instead of trying to playback 4k, it reads every 4th line and essentially gives you 1k playback which is visually terrific – especially if you’re publishing out to YouTube.
Also, while I applaud you not giving Premiere Pro all of your RAM, I think you’ve given it a tad too little. As a rule of thumb, you should give Adobe applications 50-60% of available system RAM. In your case, I would raise it to 16 or maybe 18GB and see how you do.
Hope this helps,
Dennis – Adobe guy -
Media encoder and convert to ProRes – kindly suggest. Is it a part of Adobe?
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Hi Serge,
It is on the Mac under Quicktime presets.
Vince Becquiot
San Francisco Bay Area
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I wonder if maybe the 960×540 Preview Render resolution could be doing more harm than good, meaning it may take longer to render than a 1080p preview since the video has to be scaled down. I would leave that alone.
Also, is all the source footage 24p? I notice the sequence is set to 24p, and if the footage is not also 24p that will add extra processing time to convert frame rate.
Thanks
Jeff Pulera
Safe Harbor Computers -
Thanks!
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