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Render Times PPro CS5 / Media Encoder
Hi!
It may be a stupid / already addressed question but I couldn’t find anything via search so I’ll try here.
I was recently trying to convert a 48 minute Video (in PPro, I had to “stitch” 3 chunks of .MTS files together that had reached the 4GB limit) into a DVD-compatible MPEG2 file for encore.
When I started the render with the default settings in Media Encoder CS5 for DVD – MPEG 2 (Quality: 4), it started encoding and then my jaw dropped. The ETA showed at 24h plus.
I then aborted and tried some really really low settings (Quality 1, Avg/Max bitrate also around the Lowest marks) and checked that “High Quality Rendering” was un-checked. Still, the 48 minutes took 3.5 hours to render.
Now admitedly, I am not a long-time Adobe user and don’t know if this is typical, but with programs like “Handbrake” (yes I know the Quality will probably be lower) I had seen MUCH faster render times.
Source footage was shot with a Panasonic HDC-HS700 (Full HD Resolution, 50fps).
Laptop is a 2 year old macbook pro (4 Gigs of Ram and 2.4 or something in that area Ghz DualCore processor running 10.6).
Is this normal? Is the quality of the Adobe endoder really so much better that it is worth the “multiples of ten” longer wait time?
I am glad for any answer,
Joe -
2 Replies
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Hi Joe,
Always very hard to answer since there are so many factors involved.
First you are downscaling from HD to SD, that’s going to take some major resources. If you want a good downscale, you need to have maximum quality checked, another major render hit. And finally you are dealing with long GOP footage, that’s strike 3 for render hell…
Not sure how that compares to FCP, but I’d be willing to bet that it’s comparable.
Once thing that usually helps is performing a full render of the timeline before exporting.
Vince Becquiot
Kaptis Studios
San Francisco – Bay Area -
On my machine, CS5 export of 1080i/30 .mts to MPEG-2 DVD at default settings takes about 1 min per 2 min of material — IOW about 2x real time. That’s with no effects, and without pre-rendering of timeline.
Using effects without pre-rendering would be much slower, unless you have GPU acceleration. A quick test would be turn off all effects and try to export a shorter clip, then turn them back on, reboot CS5, export and compare times.
Or you could pre-render (sequence > render entire work area). But if that’s faster on export, you just traded shorter export time for longer pre-render time — it’s still taking a long time.
If your slow export is due to effects, your options for GPU acceleration are more limited on a Mac. I think the only supported card is the Quadro FX 4800. On Windows machines there’s a hack to enable other nVidia cards, but I don’t know if that’s available on a Mac.
Quad-core i7-860 @ 3.8Ghz, 8GB DDR3, 10k rpm velociraptor boot drive, 7200 rpm 1.5 TB data drive, GTX-275 GPU, Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit.
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