Premiere Pro CC eating up CPU…

[Angelo Lorenzo]

So much missing information:

1) What type/compression is your current in-timeline footage?

2) What format are you exporting to? Better yet, a screenshot of your export settings may help reveal issues.

3) GPU acceleration only helps with so much, usually resizing and some effects. Under no circumstances is the GPU used in the actual compression process. Please read https://blogs.adobe.com/premierepro/2011/02/cuda-mercury-playback-engine-and-adobe-premiere-pro.html which is up to date for CS6, and I don’t think much has changed for CC.

4)You cannot control the amount of threads used for rendering or the amount of CPU usage, at least not within Premiere (I’m not terribly familiar with any activity wrangling utilities for Mac, Process Lasso is a decent Windows solution). RAM is not terribly key in the export process, it will use what it needs based on the amount of effects and frame size; if you aren’t utilizing 100% of RAM, it’s a good indication you aren’t hitting a bottleneck with system memory and that’s about all you can deduce.

5) CUDA, OpenGL will perform to a similar level but is more limited to the amount of tasks it can accelerate.

6) With iMacs I find that some issues stem from overheating and the mobo throttling CPU to protect itself from damage; video processing will produce a ton of heat. I would monitor this and get a desk fan if needed.

7) What, to you, classifies as a “extremely slow” export? A screenshot of your timeline to see overall complexity could be helpful.

——————–
Angelo Lorenzo

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[Cory Pennington]

Thanks for the response, Angelo.

1, 2 & 7)
I had an approx 3 min video (Canon 7D, so H.264 footage) rendering out to H.264, 23.976fps, 1920×1080, max render depth (I will get a screen shot ASAP for the other details, not in front of it at the moment).
It initially rendered in about 3 minutes. Two days later I added 2 PSD, small watermark logos and it jumped the render time to 40+ minutes (I see now I didn’t emphasize this catalyst in the initial post).
I realize it could have been a million different things, but I was surprised that when I was trying to diagnose the problem I could see CPU usage in activity monitor and couldn’t see GPU activity.
With all the talk of GPU within Adobe I would think it’d be a more obvious thing to monitor.

3)
Thanks for the link, I was under the impression that GPU did impact export times, but I wasn’t sure exactly how apparently indirectly. I don’t pretend to understand the relationship between rendering and encoding for final output, but timeline rendering and AME exporting were very similarly slow in this case.

4)
Using all memory is good, check. So I’ve read about alotting RAM for each respective core, is that what wrangling is? I’m mainly concerned with RAM because I’d ideally like to export in the background with AME and work on the next project in PPro.

5)
Does anyone have a good link explaining the pros and cons between OpenGL and CUDA acceleration? I’ve Googled but can’t find a good side by side comparison if you have both options.

6)
Excellent point. I will monitor that.

Thanks again for your help, Angelo Lorenzo.

Cory R. Pennington
http://www.jackalopecreative.com

[Walter Soyka]

[Cory Pennington] “Thanks for the link, I was under the impression that GPU did impact export times, but I wasn’t sure exactly how apparently indirectly. I don’t pretend to understand the relationship between rendering and encoding for final output, but timeline rendering and AME exporting were very similarly slow in this case.”

I think you misunderstood Angelo on this point.

The GPU does impact export/rendering times in most cases. There are specific things that the GPU accelerates (scaling, some effects) but there are also specific things it does not (decompressing source frames, some effects, compressing finished frames). In other words, not every single calculation in Premiere is GPU-accelerated.

[Cory Pennington] “I had an approx 3 min video (Canon 7D, so H.264 footage) rendering out to H.264, 23.976fps, 1920×1080, max render depth (I will get a screen shot ASAP for the other details, not in front of it at the moment). It initially rendered in about 3 minutes. Two days later I added 2 PSD, small watermark logos and it jumped the render time to 40+ minutes (I see now I didn’t emphasize this catalyst in the initial post).”

Everybody ticks the “Maximum bit depth” and “Maximum render quality.” After all, who wouldn’t want the best?

However, these are render hogs, and they change the way Premiere processes, so you might consider unchecking them unless you do specifically need them.

“Maximum bit depth” forces the renderer to process in 32bpc floating point. All sources are converted to 32bpc, processed in 32bpc floating point for 32b effects, and then converted back down as necessary for output. This gives greater precision (translation: smoother gradients) and eliminates internal clipping (translation: different-looking blurs, glows and shadows).

If you are not using 32bpc floating point effects, you do not need “Maximum bit depth.” Even if you are using 32bpc effects, you may or may not not want “Maximum bit depth” because the calculations and thus the look are different.

“Maximum render quality” affects how scaling is performed. If your sources and your output are the same size, you can leave this off. If your sources are already highly compressed, you probably want to leave this off to avoid introducing sharpening artifacts.

Short version: try turning off the “maximum” settings. You may not need them and your render times should improve.

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
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[Ivan Myles]

[Cory Pennington] “With all the talk of GPU within Adobe I would think it’d be a more obvious thing to monitor.”

Nvidia System Monitor provides real time monitoring of the GPU and other components.

[Tim Kolb]

The GPU (choose CUDA for an NVIDIA card and OpenCL for an AMD card…as of CC, they’re pretty comparable)is used to speed computing of effects in Premiere Pro’s timeline, so any effects you’ve applied will be helped by GPU acceleration, but the codec operations (decode/encode) are primarily CPU based serial functions…

I have no idea how a piece of software can utilize 6X more CPU than you actually have, that’s not even possible. Encoding should hit your CPUs pretty hard, that would be how you know you’re getting the most power involved in the process. If you choose the ‘Export’ option in the export dialog, you’ll do a direct export and tie up the software, if you’re using the ‘Queue’ feature, you’re taking your Premiere Pro timeline and offloading it to a background version of Premiere Pro to feed to Media Encoder…and encoding will start and stop if you choose to continue editing in Premiere Pro as the software is set up to favor the software that is being actively engaged by the user and use only available processor cycles for the background process.

What sort of PSD document are you using? Is it the same framesize as the video you’re handling? is it RGB/8 bit?

Is the sequence the same frame size, frame rate, and pixel aspect as your camera footage?

As has been mentioned, the ‘maximum quality’ option is usually best used for downconverting (exporting 720p from a 1080p timeline, etc.) as it doesn’t usually improve a pixel-pixel export very noticeably.

Maximum bit depth may not be adding much to your process either as you’re starting with 8 bit footage and exporting to 8 bit.

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

Adobe Certified Instructor