How to Export Faster
I've been trying scores of ways to render faster the last week. I'm working on an on-going series that is heavy on effects. It's a kids show, so there's all kinds of AE dynamic links, effects, transitions, the works.
It's a 28 minute show broken up into 3 PP projects of about 9 minutes each.
The VERY VERY best I've been able to come up with is 2 hrs. to render each of the 9 minute clips.
I'm desperate for help since I feel I have done everything anyone's ever suggested and have read hundreds (thousands?) of posts to streamline this. Thanks for everyone's help (Jim, Colin, Bill, Jeff, Harm, and the other top-10 guys and everyone else). The info has been most useful. I'm closer, but I'm still not there. I've got lots of these shows to do, and they are all rushes, so I really need to make my workflow faster for this project to work.
Here's what I've done to get to the point I'm at, but at this point, I don't know what more to do to make my final exports faster. Tell me if any of the below is overkill, not enough, stupid, etc.
- I made the mistake of dynamically linking all my AE comps that were heavy renders into PP. I learned the hard way. (E.g. a 30 second clip takes 4 hours in AE to render). So to "fix" that, I now export all my complicated AE comps as TIFF sequences and import the TIFF sequence into Premiere. My thought is that there is nothing to render/calculate other than joining a bunch of pictures together. But this poses another problem. I can't have real time playback, so...
- I then render everything in the timeline using Cineform High HD setting. Now I have real time playback and lossless-enough-for-me rendered video. This adds time to the building-of-the-project process, but it's supposed to pay off in the end when I don't have to spend so much time exporting.
- Then I export the project making sure to use the preview files that Premiere/Cineform create in an effort to save time on the final export. This helps A LOT as it takes my formally 8 hour Premiere export to 2 hrs. A great improvement, but not enough.
- Pull my hair out wondering why it's taking 2 hours to render a 9 minute clip. This is ridiculous, IMO. When I send it to AME it takes 2:30, so I just render in Premiere.
I'm currently rendering from the Cineform preview files and exporting to h.264 (mp4) at pretty low quality/size (around 9/100) so I can post it on Viemo. Not sure if the transcoding is what's chewing up all my time, but I thought that having my entire timeline green, rendered and ready to roll was supposed to do the trick. Really, what's to calculate? My transitions, effects, AE comps are already burned into the Cineform previews. Why does it take 1:40 hrs. to export out just 9 minutes of finished video?
My hardware pretty much follows the book and Harm's suggestions. I'm on a blazing machine, i7 980x with 24 gigs ram, GTX480 card, W7 Ultmate 64. Sitting on a 4-disc Raid-0 on a different location than my OS which is different from my scratches, blah, blah, yada, yada. It's pretty much by the book completely.
9 minutes of Cineform to h.264 taking almost 2 hours can't possibly be right, can it? There is no calculating other than the codec conversion, right? My entire timeline is green.
What can I do differently? What am I doing wrong?
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