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Premiere Pro CS3 render times
Long-time Premiere user – ever since the 5.1 days. (Anyone else start out with Premiere 5.1 and a Pinnacle DV500?)
About 6 months ago I upgraded from Production Suite CS2 to CS3. I immediately saw render times (meaning exporting a project to an AVI, QT, MPG, etc.) immediately grow a LOT. Short, 1-2 minute projects which I was previously rendering in 3-5 minutes were suddenly taking 10-15 minutes.
Thus began my long hardware battle trying to add some performance capability to my older machine. After an epic struggle, a couple weeks ago I finally upgraded to a Core 2 QUAD machine with 4 GB RAM, running XP SP3. When I finally got everything installed and running (including a few unforseen problems which extended the process several days – you know how it goes, makes you want to scream) I discovered that while Premiere and all other software on the machine are RUNNING well, my render times went down a bit but not nearly as I had hoped.
So, mainly I just want to confirm … is my experience unique or have others experienced the same?
Additionally, has anyone discovered an optimal hardware config that actually improves performance significantly (rendering and otherwise). Right now I’m running one IDE drive for system/programs, another for projects and temp files, plus an external USB 2.0 drive for stock video/pics, etc. Has anyone noticed better performance from SATA drives or other configurations of project/temp files, etc.?
Very intested in all your experiences and suggestions.
David Foster
Jack of all Music-and-Tech Trades
Dayspring Church
Auburn, IN -
4 Replies
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Having material on a USB drive will slow rendering…that material will be accessed the slowest.
Have you tried a render on a project where all the material is on your internal drives?
TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions, -
Yeah, and it’s still fairly slow, though I’m sure you’re right about the USB drive being slower to access.
Tim, how do you have your drives set up? Do you have your render location on the same drive as your project files?
One thing I noticed yesterday is that when it’s rendering I think it’s only using one of the two dual-processors. On a single processor machine if it’s rendering I can’t do anything else. On my Core 2 QUAD if it’s rendering I can do other things at the same time, leading me to believe that Premiere is not taking advantage of the two processor cores.
Jack of all Music-and-Tech Trades
Dayspring Church
Auburn, IN -
start[David Foster] “I think it’s only using one of the two dual-processors.”
Start the Windows Task Manager and look under the performance tab, it will tell you how the CPUs are doing.
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Another very important factor in render time is the amount of system RAM you devote to Premiere Pro.
CS3 and CS4 are not 64-bit applications, so they are limited as to how much RAM you can give them (actually all applications are limited but, with 64-bit the limitation goes way beond what is possible to put into today’s computers). About all Premiere Pro can possibly see is 3 or 3.5G of system RAM, but I’ll bet your system must have RAM installed in pairs, which means you’ll need 4G of RAM for your system if you are running Windows XP.
If you are in Vista, Vista will be able to allocate 4G of RAM per application, so you might consider installing 6 or 8G of RAM in your computer.
To get the exact specifications of RAM for your system, I prefer to use Crucial and their handy little application to examine your computer and to recommend RAM upgrades. I don’t always buy from Crucial, as they do not always have the least-expensive RAM. If you are purchasing RAM, you need to buy only from someone who offers a 100% no-questions-asked lifetime guarantee on their memory chips.
The single best speedup technique for any computer is to add RAM. The second best technique is to use faster drives. A fast drive array is also one of the most expensive upgrades you can make (other than buying a whole new system). So look to RAM first, faster drives second (and a striped SATA array is never a bad solution for high-speed storage).
If you are doing HD — no matter what compression, you should factor in the cost of a drive array for any venture that uses HD. You will always get better performance.
What if there were no hypothetical questions?
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