What is going on with Adobe Media Encoder (CS4)?!?!

[Tim Kolb]

On the flyout menu in the Media Encoder setup dialogue (3rd of the way down along the right side of the panel), there is an option to include source XML data…make sure that is unchecked.

then see what you get for run time…

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

[Joseph Donnelly]

Just gave that a try but no appreciable increase in speed or functionality. Is AME optimized for single-core processors? I can’t fathom why it would run faster on a single-core, single processor rather than a two-core, dual processor set-up. My chipset is a bit old, but not any older than the M4 plus the added RAM should make it go faster, no?

Joseph Donnelly
Editor

[Joseph Donnelly]

Actually, scratch what I said previously: it’s now rendering almost in real-time with that unchecked. I also just virus scanned, defragmented, and closed a bunch of BG processes (down to 40 from 48).

It can’t be xml info that’s slowing me down that much, can it? But I also find it a bit difficult to imagine that simply defragmenting and closing a couple non-intensive processes could yield this manner of improvement.

Any ideas?

Joseph Donnelly
Editor

[Tim Kolb]

[Joseph Donnelly] “It can’t be xml info that’s slowing me down that much, can it?”

Well…how many shots in the timeline? It doesn’t take much of a project to create 150 cuts…now you have a data transfer equal to all the fields in the metadata panel…for each clip segment.

That accumulation step can take some time before an actual “encoding” gets underway…

That’s not to say that there’s no way your canceling some background processes had any effect…it may have had great effect. I have no idea what you shut down…

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

[Craig Leibowitz]

Hi,
Saw your posting here. I’m having major issues with CS4 Media Encoder. It’s so slow. I just rendered a 3 minute piece that took about 7 minutes in Premiere 1.5, but 35 minutes in CS4. Same settings, same computer, same content save a few small edits.
I’m looking for that dialogue box with the XML data box check, but I don’t see it anywhere, either in the settings area nor in the box with videos in cue.
I feel like part of the problem is an .mov file. It seems to speed up a bit after awhile, but not much. I’m now exporting the same video using the wmv9 settings for a 512 download at 360*264 at 25fps, audio at 128kpbs, two passes, and it gave me a 2.5 hour estimated render time. Are you kidding me?!?! Any suggestions would be great!!
I may have to go back to 1.5 to render this damn thing.

[Collin Ryan]

I’m having the same problem, but worse. My computer isn’t particularly fast, but in CS3 I was able to render videos with a fair amount of speed. For some reason, Adobe Media Encoder is taking an hour and a half to render a minute and thirty seconds of plain and simple sd footage. I’m exporting to h.246, which I understand is slow to encode, but not THAT slow, and other formats take similar amounts of time. While rendering, Task Manager tells me that Adobe Media Encoder is usually using ZERO PERCENT of my CPU, and never going above 25%. Idle Process is using most of the CPU, with PProHeadless using the remaining bit (Although Headless sometimes reaches up to 50%)

Any help? Thank you. 🙂

[Perry Sheppard]

I think I’ve tracked this down to be a problem with Media Encoder CS4 update 4.2 (which was part of a standard update release from Adobe). Based on the tests I’ve done, it impacts Flash .f4v encoding, but not MPEG or standard .mov encoding (I don’t have time to test every encoding set). I’ve concluded that it’s a Media Encoder/Flash problem (technically I didn’t test enough to say this with certainty, but I’m fairly confident it’s the case). On our test machines, a 1 hour encode increased to 9 hours on the same file after the 4.2 update was installed (using .f4v encoding).

Media Encoder CS4 4.1.0.107 is reasonably stable and does not introduce the extended render time problem so we uninstalled all Adobe products, used the CS4 cleanup utility (available at Adobe’s website), then reinstalled clean. Turned off automatic updates, updated everything except Media Encoder, tracked down the appropriate updates to get us to Media Encoder 4.1.0.107 and installed them manually. Problem fixed.

Great right? Not really. Getting a clean install is really painful (just try it) and takes a lot of time; if you get it wrong, you have to start from scratch. So, my new MacPro Desktop 16 core 8gb machine automatically updated the other day and now renders slower than an iMac 2.66.

I contacted Adobe almost 3 months ago about this problem. They have yet to call back even after harassing them repeatedly. I even offered to help test and troubleshoot with them since we had one computer down and two identical systems running properly. No luck. I couldn’t recommend Adobe products now with any confidence.

Also: the XMP fix mentioned above has no impact on my render times.

Of interest: After Effects CS4 (fully updated) renders .f4v at approximately twice the speed as Media Encoder CS4 (fully updated) on the tests I’ve run. It’s still too slow (less than real-time) but better. Oddly, the identical settings in these two apps created two f4v files of different sizes (the After Effects file was about 10% larger).

[Dirk Schooner]

Just to let you know, you are not alone, having exactly the same issues with AME CS4, it’s runnig like a dog. This is on 2 different machines, the only similarity between them being that they are running Win7 64bit. Both easily fast enough to render files much quicker than this. I checked the performance, and AME is using on average about 6% of CPU even set at real time (same on both machines).

Also, as mentioned After Effects, redering the same length of project (in fact more or less the same thing) at maybe 0.5 of real time, much faster. AME seems to have this problem mainly with rendering to MP4 and FLV, althouhg it’s noticably slower for everything else too.

Using a free progam like avidemux, makes Adobe Media Encoder look like it’s running on a ZX Spectrum.

I am not going to bore readers with my spec. etc. There is simply something very wrong with AME CS4 (fully updated) running on Win7 64bit, that’s all I know.

I tend now to render short projects out uncompressed and use another aplication for encoding. This is not good for larger projects though.

Adobe must know this is not right.

[Perry Sheppard]

Found a post yesterday that suggests that AME 4.2.x has auto-enabled ‘Frame Blending’. So, anytime your input frame rate is different than your output frame rate Frame Blending turns on and slows everything to a crawl.

I ran a quick test and a 2.5 hour render dropped to 0.5 hour when I changed the frame rate to ‘same as source’. Unfortunately, there’s no way to turn Frame Blending off.

So, if Adobe is listening, I’d like to make a simple request for a ‘Frame Blending’ enable/disable checkbox in AME.

[Jonas Bendsen]

If this is true, then it is unacceptable. Adobe must allow the user control over “frame blending.” If you’ve disabled frame blending in your project time line, you obviously don’t want it active, so don’t let AME RE-enable it!

I am rendering a 102 minute feature with only two clips on the timeline, the original footage and a “title” clip overlay for a watermark copyright burn-in (thus the XML data shouldn’t be the issue -there are only two clips).

Rendering to MPEG-DVD out of Premiere using Adobe Media Encoder takes more than 42 hours. If I import the project into Adobe After Effects and render via the render cue, it takes less than 3 hours using the same MPEG-DVD settings.

Though I’m not entirely convinced it’s the issue, “frame blending” does seem like a good culprit for my problem, as the original uncompressed footage is 23.976 and the target footage is 29.97. If I enable frame blending in the Premiere timeline (enable it on the title clip), it doesn’t seem to make any difference from a render where the frame blending is disabled; this would seem to indicate that frame blending is occurring whether I enable it or not.

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This is my life, I edit and edit and edit and edit…