No hardware Encoding in Premiere Pro 2020

I found the video below and that will likely help you. It made my hardware encoding option appear. Though I didn;t understand the language, it's easy to follow.....a simple proces

https://youtu.be/2qykZIvdfzc

You are most welcome. That bit is SO bloody confusing. I mean ... really, could it be more confusing somehow? Not thinking so ... 😉

Premiere 2020 has higher hardware demands a bit than 2019, and seems really "intriguing". On some systems it's fast and smooth, others ... a bit less than 2019 ... and some systems just bump along poorly in playback and exports.

Neil

Which "hardware encoding" are you referring to? It includes two completely different things.

If you mean the phrase "hardware encoding" in the Summary section of the exports, that has nothing to do with GPU use. It only refers to the presence of Intel QuickSync hardware in your CPU ... and is only a factor for H.264 exports. If your CPU has the QuickSync hardware and its enabled in the BIOS, you get "hardware" in the Summary section. Which means the CPU is sending the H.264 encoding to its own internal circuit for processing.

But if your CPU does NOT have the QuickSync hardware inside, you will see "software encoding" in the export dialog's Summary section. Meaning the H.264 encoding is done totally by the "regular" part of the CPU.

NEITHER ... has anything whatever to do with the use of the GPU by Premiere, and yea ... it's so totally confusing.

If you are set in the Project dialog to use Mercury Acceleration/CUDA for that card, Premiere will do so ... for the parts that Premiere uses a GPU for, and those parts of the work only. Remember, Premiere uses the GPU only for those things on the GPU Accelerated Effects List ... but not for other things.

The items on the list are things that involve major frame reszing like Warp Stabilizer or color work such as Lumetri.

The CPU is the center of the export process and it will send things to the GPU that are "appropriate" within the coding, as the CPU gets to them. So a sequence that's completely resized on export will have heavy GPU use for that export. The same sequence without frame-resizing or GPU-accelereated effects will have virtually no GPU activity.

That's just the way it's written. So which is it ... the Summary section of the Export dialog? I'm thinking that is possible, as nearly every post ever filed saying they can't get "hardware encoding on export" is actually referring to the Intel QuickSync hardware issue, and not Premiere's GPU use.

"Use previews" works very differently depending on the previews chosen, btw. Use an intraframe codec like ProRes or DNxHD/R and export to that same format/codec, as every frame is complete, it works well. Use an interframe H.264 codec, it can't work like that. Really doesn't help at all.

Neil

Edit: On thinking a bit more, I don't believe the Xeons have QuickSync hardwared inside ... and another note ... in testing, the Premiere team found that the Intel QuickSync encoding is a bit faster than "software only" meaning the standard computations of the CPU ... but the software encode is a slighly higher quality. Just FYI.

And of course, that only is "a thing" with H.264/long-GOP exports.

Read this please:

Everything you need to know about GPU in Premiere Pro

I used to "Use Previews" for exporting and could export a timeline at approx. 2x realtime (:30 to export a minute of timeline), and now it won't use Previews (so I think something else is going on). But if I de-select "Use Previews" I can get it to export but a 1 minute timeline now takes over 3 minutes to export (1/3 realtime)  😞 bummer.