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BrianM824
BrianM824
Inspiring
December 11, 2016
Question

Is This AME Export Speed Normal on an iMac 5K?

  • December 11, 2016
  • 1 reply
  • 621 views

Hey there,

New to the Adobe forums here. I've spent the majority of my last few days searching for answers to the following questions/concerns but despite the insight that I have read it seems as though the answers to my questions might be highly individualized. Here's the scoop. I recently purchased a DJI Phantom 4 drone for aerial video footage. It's the only 4K footage that I'm working with right now, but I am mixing its 4K footage with Canon T3i footage within Premiere on a 4K timeline. My goal is to export my 4K timeline footage to H.264 4K (which will preserve the resolution of the drone footage while upscaling my 1080 T3i footage to 4K) as fast as possible while preserving as much quality as possible. I have recently invested in a new iMac 5K to help cut down my export times. The iMac is a 4 GHz Intel Core i7, 24 GB 1867 MHz DDR3 RAM, 250 GB Flash Storage, with a AMD Radeon R9 M395X graphics card. I have a USB 3.0 eternal HDD that typically provides 65 MB/s read write speeds that I have everything stored to besides the Adobe program files which are stored on my local Macintosh HD. I'm exporting via AME to the external HD with the following settings: 3840x2160, H.264, VBR 2 Pass, 60 Mbps Target Bitrate, 75 Mbps Max Bitrate, 23.976 fps, Max Render Quality, Max Depth. I typically apply RGB Curves, fast color corrector, 3 or 4 secondary color correction three-way color correctors, one .LUT, and minor sharpening to the drone footage for color grading purposes with two .LUTS, a three-way color corrector, auto contrast, and minor sharpening on the DSLR footage. On average, the 4K timeline with about 30 seconds of this 4K drone footage and  4 minutes, 30 seconds of 1080 footage (5 minutes total) takes upwards of 4 hours to export with the aforementioned settings. My question is rather simple: Is such an export time normal? Is there anything that I have set improperly? I hope that I provided all of the information necessary for some of the experts out there to be able to answer this for me but if I neglected to include any important information please do not hesitate to let me know and I will try to provide that information as quickly as possible. I greatly appreciate your time and help with this matter and look forward to determining if my computer is underperforming or behaving normally. Regardless, this same process used to take upwards of 20 hours on my MacBook Pro so it is still an upgrade - the question is just whether or not the iMac is achieving proper export times.

Thank you in advance!

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1 reply

chrisw44157881
chrisw44157881
Inspiring
December 11, 2016

I'm watching seveal threads on this and unfortunately, Adobe won't tell us exactly which effects are single threaded or choke 20 core processors so that they only reach 18% per core! One user did note that that exporting to dnxhr first and then a quick final h.264 render did jump processors from 18% to 30-40% which leads to the basic assumption that multiple effect layers choke adobe products to death geometrically. This may indicate that multiple small color render passes would be quicker than one massive push in color pipeline with luts etc.

BrianM824
BrianM824Author
Inspiring
December 12, 2016

It's interesting that you bring that up, Chris... I did do some testing and discovered the following: When I export by queuing in AME, I am using around 25% CPU on average. When directly exporting through Premiere Pro I am averaging around 35% CPU use (and I hear the iMac fan going). To whomever might know the answer to the following question: Is there a reason for the difference in CPU use between these two export methods? If there is, what is it and why does it occur?

On a final note, another problem I've now noticed: My exports ALWAYS get stuck when exporting one 4K video source, one 1080 video source, and two 4K grain video sources (layered over my 1080 source as an 50% opacity overlay) from a 4K timeline. AME just stops encoding. The memory is no longer utilized and the encode just stops on a random frame but AME itself does not become unresponsive - the time remaining just keeps creeping back up and up. I realize what I'm doing is very CPU-intensive, but that an encoding stopping unexpectedly with no crash or AME freezing in the middle of an export is much worse than a slow encode. Even more odd, all other encodes (1080 timeline upscaled to 4K w/ and w/out grain and 4K timeline exported to 4K w/out grain) make it through the AME export process with no problem (although slower than expected).

This unreliability is unacceptable for the monthly cost of the programs.

chrisw44157881
chrisw44157881
Inspiring
December 12, 2016

does it finish the render if you disable cuda and change premiere's preferences from performance to memory?

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