Media Encoder 2020 render extremely slow

[jon55]

Same problem here, out of nowhere rendering in the timeline and exporting from both Ae and AME started taking much, much longer. What would usually take 1-2 mins is suddenly taking 30 - 40. I updated to Ae 2020, no change, updated my graphic drivers, no change. Tried rendering with mercury software only rather than GPU, hasn't made any difference.

I have 12 core, 64 gigs Ram, Nvidia 1080 Ti, I don't really see why it should be struggling like it is. At one point I couldn't even use masks in Ae because the lag was so bad it made it impossible to work.

Its really frustrating to go from a relatively great workflow to something that is, at times, barely usable.

Any advice or fixes on this would be greatly appreciated.

Title edited by Mod

[Bumbler]

Does anyone know if this issue was fixed with 14.7?  14.7 as a whole hasn't been added to the Fixed Issues list yet.  I'm scared to update until we get some word on this.

[BGhibby]

I have given in a try, upgraded to 14.7 as it could not be worse than 14.6.  Sadly it is no better either, still excruciatingly slow. This really is a very poor state of affairs.  The fact that this time last year I was exporting from a massivly inferior PC at quite litteraly 10x the speed attained now is a joke. Workflow is simply crippled by this, I have to leave all exports over night and hope for the best I dont need to make last minute tweaks. Come on Adobe, get your act together and fix this.

[FrankAE]

I am on 14.8 version and the issue is still not fixed.

[Yurii5FF2]

I'd like to add to this. I also have the same issue with Media Encoder. Maybe my info will help understand what's wrong.

• So I'm trying to render a video that I've slowed down in Premiere Pro. No effects, no nothing, just slowed down video and that's it.
• When I'm rendering directly from Premiere Pro, the 2 mins video renderes in like under 30 seconds using the hardware render. That demonstrates that it's not my local issue.
• When trying to render with Media Encoder though, it either crahses with no error, or shows me ETAs like 235 hours and after like 15 minutes crashes without error.
• When I switch to software only render, it renders successfully (although in about 3-4 minutes instead of under 30 seconds like in Premiere Pro) but crashes after completing.
• And it seems like it ignores rendering presets that I'm sending from Premiere Pro because it creates .m4v video file with a separate .aac audio file while I'm trying to render h264 into .mp4. And when I'm trying to edit presets directly in Media Encoder, it crashes.
• Tryied to run as admin.

My PC:

• Lateset Windows 10 20H2
• CPU: Ryzen 7 3800X
• GPU: Radeon RX 5700 XT with latest drivers.
• RAM: 32 GB at 3600 speed.
• Everything is installed on SSDs.

I've no idea what's going on and I really hope that these issues will be resolved asap.

[Bumbler]

Hey Adobe, if it helps you track down the issue, I think Ryzen-based systems might be the common denominator here.  Might be worth looking into.

[ethrop3]

Hi,
I'm on a fresh i7 10700k with 64Gb RAM. Same issue. 
A render in AME takes 10h00. On AFE render tab, it takes 3h00.

[ethrop3]

AFE = AFX

[Eduardo5E14]

I am glad I found this thread. I must admit, I am a new content creator but I am the kind of person that researches and seeks advice and loves to learn how to do things right. I'm on a Ryzen 9 3950x, 2080ti, 32gb RAM system. I specifically bought this rig to allow me to game and edit. I've learned that H264 is a delivery format and can be the reason for playback being laggy in Premiere. My queries lead me to proxies being the solution. After research I managed to set up an encoding and ingests preset (Quicktime format for multi-channel audio) to make 540p proxies for my 1080p footage (3 videos, each 2 hours long). Media encoder is currently running and the first proxy is going to take 5+ hours....... for a 540p proxy. Wtf? If I'm lucky, all thre proxies will take 15 hours total. Something tells me I won't be lucky. 

Not sure if I should let it run or if I should try reverting AME to the version others have specified. 

It was getting demoralizing to think it was my machine at fault, despite investing a good amoubt of money on it. Maybe it isn't my machine? and maybe I did learn the right things but the problem is actually Media Encoder? 

I'd appreciate any other tips to try, please oh please!

[alic41991277]

I am having the same issues, the most stable version I have found is 14.3 (14.7 is almost unusable). A test I have been running is on an 8 second clip, with version 14.7 the H.264 took over 1hr 44 minutes and at version 14.3 it's at 13 minutes.

[sholderman1]

I'd like to report the same as alic41991277.

[JAMILOVE77]

Me too it's frustrating becausing Adobe is not cheap and we pay a lot.

[JAMILOVE77]

because

[Shamus!]

OK, I finally lost patience with the atrocious hassle ME has caused me, the final straw being it starting to hang at any random point in an after effects render. Enough. The solution my friends is don't use it. Simple: get the Rainbox media encoder - DuME

It's free and it works beautifully, simply. Blood pressure now heading back down. Note to Adobe: simple, fast, and effective is better than cumbersome, error-prone, and infuriating. Just fix what you already have and stop adding stuff until you've done that. Please.

[FrankAE]

@Shamus!Thank you sir for the solution and the link. I've quickly tested this tool and it works for me just fine.

In my opinion Adobe should focus on fixing essential funcionality of Adobe Media Encoder instead of adding extra bells and whistles.

[Shamus!]

I should add that DuME can be called from After Effects just like ME, sending your selected comp straight to the encoder. It's a beautiful thing and is now sitting in my UI looking very pleased with itself.

[Frank_B]

For everyone else experiencing issues with AME, consider switching to DuME: https://rainboxlab.org/tools/dume/

If for whatever reason it doesn't meet your requirements there are other good but paid media encoders for After Effects:

https://aescripts.com/bg-renderer

https://www.mekajiki.com/rendergarden/

[roberth3510600]

I, too, was having extremely long encoding times when using Adobe Media Encoder.  I read somewhere to bypass AME, and just Export while in Premiere.  I think it relies on the computer's hardware more.  Did a test export of a 2 min clip.  Worked great.  Now it's currently exporting the entire 40 min video.  It's halfway through the process.  (Estimated 2 hour time for the whole video).

[JamesTurnerYT]

Exact same issue here. Ever since 14.4 it's been incredibly slow. Videos that would take 4 minutes to render have taken up to 1 hour. 15.0 still the same issue. You can no longer even downgrade in the Creative Cloud app to a version that works, they only allow going down to 14.9 now. This is crazy, something so mission critical is completely broken and we can't even revert to a version that works.

For reference my system is: Ryzen 7 3700x, 32gb Ram, RTX 3090 - there should be zero issues. This is entirely on Adobe and it would be nice if they would at least acknowledge it

[Wei5C64]

Adding my experience here, AME experience has been pretty bad for me. The rendering speed is OK at the start, but gets slower and unbeareably slow towards the end. Something is not right here, I switched to a cheap alternative encoding software, it took only a few minutes for my purposes.

[mmillson]

I can confirm that this issue is still there in Adobe Media Encoder 2021. 
I'm running an i9-9900k at 5Ghz, 32GB Ram, RTX 2080 and all of my footage is 1080p MP4 running from a Samsung NVME drive.

A project that used to take 5 minutes to export now takes 50 - 60 minutes.

I've started moving all of my editing to Davinci Resolve which rendered the same project with the same files in 2mins 30seconds.

Adobe has been awful since 2020 and I will be cancelling my subscription! I see no advantage in any of their systems any more. They're all slow, cumbersome and constantly crashing. There are so many better and cheaper alternatives out there now! What's the point in Adobe!

[oliviah16679408]

Absolutely awfull. Hadn’t used ME since the last update and it obviously has to doo with exactly that: the update. A 10 second video from After Effects took 1 hour and 30 minutes and the video is literally just text gainig opacity and an icon moving through the screen... HOW?! Thank god I have only needed it one time since then, I will now update the newest 2021 version and really hope that issue is gone. Do better people.

[epiphanyh]

I have the same problem. I'm on a pretty new mac laptop (OS Big Sur) that's as maxed out for video editing as one can get and while I'm used to it struggling with some bigger projects, it's clear the problem this time is media encoder because when I export from after effects my renders are taking  closer to their usual time. However I have over 200 30ish second videos I need to export, and doing them one by one through after-effect isn't gonna cut it, I've tried changing my media encoder settings, and switching codecs to apple pro res 422 but it's still taking forever even to export a 20 second video with nothing but some color correction and a mask on it. I can't even go back to the old version of media encoder because its no longer appearing in my creative cloud. 

Adobe needs to hurry up and figure out a fix for this problem because it's ridiculous and is making it literally impossible for me to do my job. I Have several longer 30 minute videos I need to start working on soon and I dread to even imagine how long their render times are going to be if this problem isn't fixed. 

[mike59999]

Performace is garbage.  I make videos on youtube...intro sequence from after effects (i just change text)...10 seconds...60 fps. 

Since these last several updates this ten second clip that used to take less than 30 seconds now takes 25+ minutes.  Same custom settings as before (h.264, hardware encoding, vbr 1 pass @ 120).  tried switching to h.265...also dirt slow.

using an i9-9900k, dual titan xp's, 64g ram, m.2 ssd for files and a separate m2 for cache.

I have aida64 on a second monitor...during the encode both gpu usage reads as 0% and my CPU usage remains within the normal fluctuations it has and percent usage @ idle (and i am looking at all the cores).  

[Qreature]

October 2021, Still now fixed for me too.

[mikelomanto]

Well it's November 2021 and this is still happening. Rendering a 5 second video, very little animation and Media Encoder is still "Reading XMP" for the last 10 minutes.