Render Time is KILLING ME… Premiere Pro CS3

[Jim Farmer]

Sorry the PC is actually a Gateway unit (not Dell), I forget which PC’s I’m working with. Also meant to mention I’m on WinXP SP2 32bit.

[Phocas Kroon]

If you use large stills and you are not panning over the stills, convert the stills in Photoshop more close to the size of your project frame size.

Good luck

[Jeff Pulera]

Hi Jim,

I understand what you’re doing, and a Matrox card won’t help. The RT.X2 only works with “video size” images (720×480 for SD) for instance. When using larger documents and zooming in using Adobe Motion, it bypasses Matrox and you’re back to Adobe rendering again.

Try adding another hard drive and using that for video projects rather than the C: drive. As the other writer responded, if you can begin with smaller “document” sizes, that will also help, don’t make them any larger than they need to be, creates needless overhead.

Just had a thought – when you have the document blow up to full screen to detail text, if it is going to remain static for a period of time, use File > Export > Frame to create a still image of that, then place that still on a higher video track for that duration. That way, Premiere does not have to render that whole section from the high-res image, much easier to process the 720×480 still image. That should help a LOT.

Also, use the ENTER key to render red parts of timeline to green BEFORE exporting to DVD. Once timeline is all green, DVD should render very quickly from there since heavy work is done already.

Good luck with the project

Jeff Pulera
Safe Harbor Computers

[Micah Mcdowell]

I concur with what the others have said, and I’ll add that 300 dpi is way, way overkill for Premiere.

An 8.5×11″ paper at 300 dpi is 2550×3300 pixels, compared to your 720×480 frame. Use Photoshop to downrez your document that stays in the background; you have blow-ups of details as you said so the quality won’t suffer.

[Chris Buttacoli]

300 dpi is for print work. 72 dpi is for video. Of course you should downsize the document scans in photoshop to your video size 720×480(if that is the case). Nothing should have a higher res. You sound like you have everything very organized. The blow-ups you need to zoom in on should be produced in photoshop as well, again at the res of your project. Then you can expect a 10 minute render!!! – I’m just guessing :)lol –

[Jim Farmer]

Thanks for your suggestion, I have been reviewing this as a possible option. Based on all my readings I was guessing the file size of my images is the major cause of my issues (other than my inadequate PC hardware). I’ve tried reducing the file size to match my project settings but the documents appear really blurry in Photoshop at those settings. Admittedly I haven’t yet imported any of my downsized files to my project but I will give it a shot to see how it appears. My biggest concern is that the text will be unreadable when it is viewed on a large projection screen. I’ll save my project as a backup and edit my images in Photoshop to see how it looks.

I plan to add another post regarding my workflow to see if I can gain some insight on better handling of images and file types. I think I may not be going about this correctly. I am completely self taught on Premiere Pro and Photoshop and really have no one to bounce things off here in the office. I really appreciate the feedback and the existence of this forum.

Thanks!

[Micah Mcdowell]

It’s true that a 720×480 image will look horrible compared to a 300 dpi scan of a paper while opened in Photoshop, but it’ll be the same either way in Premiere.

A couple tips that ‘might’ help; use the Image/Image Size menu in Photoshop and then change the “Resample Image” option at the bottom to Bicubic Sharper and resize from there… I can’t ever tell the difference but maybe it’ll help in your case. Personally, I just make a new file from the NTSC-DV preset and scale the big image to fit inside it.

Also, save your files in the highest quality format you can (maybe TIFF or PSD).

[Jim Farmer]

Jeff – thanks for the heads up on the Matrox Card. They have a great website about their product but not exactly clear to a novice how or what their product does.

I grabbed another newer PC (Dell Optiplex 760) that is running a single Duo Core E8400, 4 GB Ram and a SATA II drive. I installed Vista Business 64 bit last night and plan to download the trial for CS4 to see if I can improve my performance there. Unfortunately the PC form factor will not allow me to add another drive otherwise I would give that a shot. If I see a significant improvement I will push for an Dell XPS (Intel i7 unit) with what I need. I’m locked into a Dell unit here in the office so I can’t stray on PC equipment.

My documents don’t exactly blow up full screen, it is really just another JPEG image of the blown up document portion that I have manipulated the position and scale setting to appear as if it comes out of the document, this image is in another track above so I can still maintain my cropped and resized video in the upper corner and the original document in the background. I tried your suggestion of exporting the frame but it grabs the entire frame or everything in the frame view. In other words, if I do that it basically screen shots the entire preview screen including the video. I’m wondering if there may be a way for me to incorporate this into my workflow so that I could just lay in the video on an above track but it seems like that could really get complicated.

I didn’t know about using the enter key to render the timeline. I’ll have to do some research on that. I’m not familiar with this process and don’t know what it is doing exactly as far as what it is rendering and to what format etc. This could be something of a time saver if I could render the timeline as I proceed in my project. I just need to know more about this.

Thanks,
Jim

[Jim Farmer]

I’m thinking maybe I need to get away from using JPEG images for my videos. Maybe I should be using another format? I was leaning toward trying PSD’s and using the layers from the documents as my blow images rather than separate JPEG images. I’ve been just trimming my “blow up” layers and saving out as JPEG images for import. Maybe the PSD layers will work better? I have not tried that yet. I’m going to post when I get time about my workflow and possible file types for some feedback.

Thanks again!

[Jim Farmer]

I need everything to read clearly on the screen so I’m having a hard time with this one. I’ve worked with graphics for a couple years now in Photoshop and have a pretty good handle on what I need to know to get by. I’m just not familiar with working this in video standards. Everything I see in 72 dpi appears blurry to me, I’m very particular about clarity in my images so I always work with 300 dpi. I don’t expect the same image quality as a TV news broadcast but I see news broadcasts all the time with documents being shown on the screen including a graphic and a video with someone talking off on the side. They look perfect, I just want something close to that quality. That is basically what I’m trying to do.

Thanks again for everyone’s input. I’ve been working in Premiere on various projects as needed for about a year and have much to learn.

Jim