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Insanely slow QTs
I’m trying out Premiere Pro CS5 and am having a ridiculous time trying to export movies for posts. I’m looking at an hour and 20 minutes to render a 3 minute H264 QT at half resolution, 960×540, 29.97 (same as sequence), KFs every 30 frames, and 50% quality. I’m currently on my Macbook Pro 15″, but have been experiencing nearly identical “performance” on my top of the line multi-core, 16 Gb RAM infused machine at work. Even trying to make a same as source output is taking over 50 minutes.
Is Premiere unable to make QTs? Would I be better off with another way of posting?
This is insane. Any thoughts?
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4 Replies
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I discussed this problem in another thread and got some feedback. Here’s my response to the feedback, which centered on my sequence type and computer types:
This goes way beyond what machines I’m using. The render times are, without exaggeration, 40 times slower than Compressor. I might expect a somewhat slower render on my Macbook Pro, but my work computer was the very best mac money could 8 months ago, prior to the most recent MacPro release. My render times are almost exactly the same on that machine.
I just started a test using the H264 codec sans QT per your suggestion. I’m getting the same render time – an hour and 25 minutes for an under 3 minute sequence.
I’m editing with raw P2 footage from an HVX 200. I’m putting the DVCProHD footage into a 1920×1080 sequence instead of a 1440×1080 sequence so my graphics can be full res. I’ve fully rendered everything in the sequence before export. I do have a couple of Boris filters on most of the shots, but again, everything is rendered.
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I’m finally having a moment to troubleshoot. In a very interesting development, I just removed ALL of the effects from my timeline. My QT movie is now allegedly going to take 7:30 the render instead of 1:25:00. This suggests that rendering effects in a timeline does not leave them rendered for final output. The encoder seems to re-render everything. That can’t be right. Can it???? That would make it ridiculous to use PP for anything project that both uses effects and needs occasional posts…like every project.
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In most cases, you can choose to use the render files in your export, there is a check box for that purpose in the export settings.
This is not often recommended for a couple of reasons.
You would be compressing twice unless you are setting your previews to “uncompressed”, and for that option to works, you’ll need a pretty beefy RAID array.
Second, most people don’t choose to use maximum quality for their renders because it’s too slow, but if you are doing any type of scaling, maximum quality should be used at export time.
Vince Becquiot
Kaptis Studios
San Francisco – Bay Area -
Bingo! There is a Use Previews checkbox. If not selected, PP re-renders everything in your sequence. When selected, it takes and hour and 20 minutes off my render and looks just fine for client posts.
PP’s “Previews” are a notion I’ve been grappling with in general. In FCP, You’re generally rendering to the quality of your sequence settings. PP has a more mysterious set of “preview” options, where it appears that I’m rendering just for quick playback, or not, if I choose QT ProRes or uncompressed for my sequence Preview option. I can see advantages in PP’s approach.
Thank you Vince.
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