Media Encoder Background Rendering – what a dissapointment

[Simon Reichel]

New source of enjoyment from the beloved Media Encoder. When you queue up exports from several different Premiere Projects it fails on all exports except those from the first project. Like it gets confused on the links to the other projects and claims it couldn’t find it and has rendered offline files. What in god’s name is the point of this program?! Jesus Christ.

[Alex Udell]

I’m no expert here at all…

but I seem to recall there was some memory mgmt and processor mgmt functions you can set up in prefs to determine load balancing. maybe someone can chime in as to what would be an ideal setup for you in your configuration.

I also seem to recall that once set….the idea is that AME would be the lowest on the totem pole if foreground editorial was taking place…meaning the encode would take longer because more resources would be pushed dynamically towards fg editorial.

It does seem to make sense that if the GPU is being allocated for RED preprocessing that it would make it unavailable or less available for other mercury tasks.

it also appears that the new cineform codec they have been talking about for transcoding workflows is really for ppl in your situation….to give you adequate resolution footage to work with that does perform in hardware challenged scenarios. Not ideal….as we all want to “start cutting now” but it is a way to deal with these things.

Sorry for your headaches….

just some things to ponder….

cheers…

Alex Udell
Editing, Motion Graphics, and Visual FX

[Ericbowen]

I have not seen increase in render times with AME if GPU acceleration is working. So I am not sure where that is coming from unless configuration or driver is an issue. If comparing the render time from direct export of Premiere to queue with AME then yes Direct export has always been faster. That is going to be because dynamic link slows the export process down since it’s a network process. There is no way to change that. If you need the fastest export then direct export. However working in Premiere is done until that is finished if you do.

GPU accelerated debayering significantly increases the data and load the GPU is handling. This means the GPU is in use far more at a higher load. When exporting in AME and the GPU acceleration is enabled, AME has to release the GPU for the GPU acceleration in Premiere. When using the GPU accelerated debayering there is allot less time the GPU is available for releasing to Premiere or vice versa. Therefore Premiere has to interrupt and take the GPU which will cause AME to go into wait status far more or switch to software render. However the major issue is memory management. The GPU accelerated debayering add’s significant more ram usage for data getting buffered for GPU acceleration since that is how it has to work. All of the frame buffers getting setup for AME either have to hold in ram or wipe to free up space for Premiere to use ram for the realtime GPU acceleration. If those buffers wipe then AME has to rebuild them when the GPU becomes available. The complexity here is 2 applications with GPU acceleration running at the same time. Each time the higher priority application requires the GPU then it interrupts the background application stopping the pipeline for rendering in it’s tracks. If the Background application is set to switch to software ie cpu render mode when that happens then all of the buffers have to be wiped and redone. This significantly increases the render time per frame and the load on the system. The only way to alleviate that bottleneck at the ram some is to have far more ram than is required for the realtime application. Even then the memory management the CPU has to handle alone will vastly increase the CPU load which leaves far less CPU processing capability for render frame processing. Hope that helps explain what is going on here.

Eric-ADK
Tech Manager
support@adkvideoediting.com

[Chris Borjis]

I’ve been cutting and exporting RED 4k here on a huge number of projects the
last month and my experience has been to best keep the program monitor at 1/8
resolution and yes the export to 1080P takes awhile, but I expect that.

This is with 2009 8-core mac pro towers with 32Gb ram, quadro 4000’s and Raid 5 storage
connected by fiber channel or pci-express direct.

When I queue several in media encoder, I just walk away from the machine knowing
that it will finish the exports if I leave it alone. But I never expected that
it would or should do that while I’m editing. Not with that kind of load.

Considering how much processing power it takes to deal with 4k footage, it all
makes sense that it would work this way.

[Dennis Radeke]

Here’s some general things to think about or do:

1) GPU debayering is accelerated for RED and a couple of other codecs but is NOT REQUIRED for fast exporting.
2) Balance as someone mentioned is key. I have recently seen a lot of users with 64GB of RAM leave 6GB of RAM for the OS and everything else. This is WRONG. General rule of thumb is 75% of TOTAL RAM to Adobe apps and 25% to OS.
3) If you’re having issues, trash the preferences of Premiere Pro AND clean the media cache.
4) Some 3rd party plugins are accelerated and will substantially increase your render time. Try without 3rd party effects to determine if one is dogging you and then reassess.
5) Warp Stabilizer and Time Remapping can add to the render time. If you’re doing a lot of this (especially common with large frame work) then this will increase your total render time.
6) Expectations: If you have a large timeline and lots of media and effects, etc. etc. and you’re rendering on a laptop with 8GB of RAM…well…. it may take a bit longer.

Hope this helps,
Dennis – Adobe guy

[Barry O’brien]

May I ask you a question? I am setting up a Mac Pro 8 core to edit EDCAM footage in Adobe Premier.

two quick questions: to get the best efficiency out of the Premier Mercury Engine, whould you recommend the Quadro 4000? How much RAM do you think that I might need? Right now, the machine had 8Gbs.

I thank you for your time.

Best Regards,

Barry O’Brien

[Chris Borjis]

Heck ya get the Quadro (or some kind of GPU accelerator…makes a BIG difference)

8gb of ram is not enough. even with 16gb ram we found 1080 work was sufficient
but choked it and crashed often when closing out of 4k edit projects.

32gb of ram is pretty much the minimal if you want a hassle free experience.

and the quadro will help big time too.

[Ericbowen]

I suggest you take a look at the Macvidcards site for some flashed Geforce 700 series cards. Those will far outperform the Quadro.

https://www.macvidcards.com/index.html

Eric-ADK
Tech Manager
support@adkvideoediting.com

[Barry O’brien]

Thank you very much for taking the time to answer! So 32 Gbs RAM is needed… OK