Limiting the CPU usage in CS6

[Angelo Lorenzo]

Task Manager > Details tab, find Premiere > right click, Set Priority > try “below normal”, do the same with AME.

There are command line tricks to launch the program with a set priority, and all child processes they start from that point on should be that priority as well if I’m not mistaken.

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Angelo Lorenzo

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[Al Jensen]

Wonderful, thanks Angelo!

[Al Jensen]

I don’t remember have this kind of slow down on my old machine, and this one has a faster CPU, RAID drives for media, SSD for OS/programs, and more RAM. The only thing it doesn’t have is an officially supported graphics card.

I have a 1gb NVIDIA GeForce 210 which is a good card, but like I said not supported. Could this be related to my inability to play media/YouTube while encoding? In other words, is my CPU maxing out at 100% because nothing is being off-loaded to the video card, whereas on my previous system the “supported” card took some of the burden? Sometimes when I click back to Premiere during encoding it actually re-paints the window, which I haven’t seen happen in years.

Any thoughts?

[Bala Chandran]

For faster rendering you need a better card with more CUDA cores. Yours has only 16, I believe. And you can add many unsupported cards to Premiere Pro’s cuda_supported_cards.txt file as instructed here:
https://www.pointsinfocus.com/learning/digital-darkroom/enable-cuda-in-premier-pro-cs6-without-a-quadro/

[Al Jensen]

Very interesting page, thanks!

[Al Jensen]

I tried both methods outlined in the link, and both of them enable the Mercury Playback Engine in Premiere, but when I go to queue the movie and export with Media Encoder it fails with an “Unknown Error”. If I change the text file back then it exports just fine.

I was thinking if this worked and the difference was noticeable that I would go buy another card with more CUDA cores, but now I’m hesitant.

[Bala Chandran]

The method works. May be something else is the issue. Make sure the txt file does not get appended with some other extension than .txt.

[Al Jensen]

Well, it’s working in the sense that the Mercury Playback stuff in Premiere is activated, and appears to be fine. It’s not working in the sense that AME errors out with an Unknown Error without doing any actual encoding.

I tried both methods of renaming the txt file and including my video card using the Adobe program to find what they call it. In both cases it activates in Premiere, but fails once I try and render.

[Al Jensen]

I think I’ve solved the mystery behind why my machine was pegging every core to 100%. I was doing a bunch of very long speedup/slowdown sequences and that’s when it maxes everything out. If I just render the same project, but with the clip at 100% speed then my CPUs are more like 85% capacity and my computer is much more usable. Anybody else have a similar experience?

[Bala Chandran]

Your video card is not up to par with your system, with only 16 CUDA cores. For instance GTX 285 has 240 cores, GTX 580 has 512 cores and the 780Ti has 2880 cores. These, among a score of others, are cards being used for video editing in PPro.