Why does render take so much longer than encode?

[Andrew Kimery]

[Steve Adams] “I see all kinds of export settings in the Export Media screen but I don’t see much about render settings, other than optimize for performance or memory, so I don’t know how to compare the two settings.”

In the Sequence Settings window there are is a “preview” section near the bottom and that’s where the settings are for making previews/renders. The number of options available in the preview setting is in part dependent on your sequence settings. For example, if your sequence is setup for Avid DNX then you will only be able to create previews/renders in the Avid DNX codec. By changing your sequence settings you’ll be able to change which codecs are available to use for previews/renders.

[Steve Adams]

Thank you!

[Steve Adams]

One more data point. I believe the reason the render I did by hitting Return took so much longer than the render that occurred during export is that the source is 1920×1080 while I was exporting to 1280×720. So the first render had to manage 2 million pixel frames while the export render worked with 1 million pixel frames. And I have a feeling that render time may be an exponential function of frame size, so doubling the frame size might quadruple the render time.

Anyway, thanks to everyone for their input.

Steve

[Tero Ahlfors]

You still haven’t provided us the exact sequence and export settings so we don’t know what you’re doing.