GPU Hardware Rendering in Premiere Elements

[Headwesty]

BAD NEWS: I just built myself an AMD-based system for Premiere Elements only to discover I should have gone Intel to get H264 hardware encoding support using Intel Quicksync
GOOD NEWS: Premiere Pro 14.2 supports H264/H265 hardware encoding using the GPU so maybe it will arrrive in PRE 2022?
QUESTION: Is this likely to happen and please can I join the beta program!

[Bill Sprague]

I have not seen a question about Quicksync for a long time! 

As near as I can tell, it was a good idea when introduced about 10 years ago.   Since then, CPUs have become much quicker, including the one in your AMD system.  In other words, your system should do well with Premiere Elements.   

The current version has some limited GPU use with a relatively short list of specific Nvidia GPUs.   Mine is not on the list so I can't test it.  Based on reports here, it does not make a lot of difference in most projects.    

With your new AMD system, how long does it take to output a video to the same quality as the source?   

Regarding 2022 and beta testing, no one knows what will be in the 2022 version and I don't know how one would apply to get into a beta program.   Unlike the open beta testing system in the Creative Cloud products, the beta system for the Elements program is not open.  

[Headwesty]

Thanks Bill for your considered reply.  My system is based on an AMD Ryzen7 3700X (8 cores) and has 32Gb RAM, an NVidia RTX 2060 GPU (which is on the list for PRE) and stonkingly fast NVMe SSDs (Samsung 980Pro).  Before building this I had a pre-built system on order (which was taking ages) and although advertised as a 'Video Editing' PC the GPU was not on the list for Premiere Elements!

I have only done a simple project so far with the new system (not the 9 video tracks in parallel stuff I did early in lock-down) and it rendered this 5:13 720p project in 1:43 which is about 3x real time.  I can live with that but it would be nice if GPU Rendering trickled down from Premiere Pro!

[Bill Sprague]

Three times realtime is nothing to be sneezed lat.  It points out that, for Premiere Elements, it may be the CPU that matters most. 

[Headwesty]

More stats for nerds. I restored my video project with 9 parallel streams and found firstly that it plays perfectly in the timeline which certainly wasn't the case on my old system. All streams are scaled and cropped and in some parts a video effect is applied (tint) to each stream. It is a 1080p project 3:10 long and it rendered in 1:49 to 720p H264. CPU and GPU were both running at 90+% so I'm very happy with that!

In another test I created an ISO DVD image of about 2hours of 720p video (for delivery to members of our church with poor online access). The 2 hour video rendered to an ISO image in 8:37. The actually render phase (to MPEG2 720x480) was 6:05 with CPU at 75% and GPU at around 70% which is about 20x real time. I'm not sure what it was doing for the first 1:47 with 7% CPU, 0% GPU and not much disk activity...

So despite saying 'Software Encoding'  it appears to make use of the GPU both for MP4 output and MPEG2 conversion. I have no further complaints about rendering in Premiere Elements 2021! 

[Bill Sprague]

Headwesty,

Would you post a build sheet for your new computer?    Thanks in advance.

Bill

[Headwesty]

Here's the spec of the machine I built for Video (and Audio) editing:

• CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 3700X Gen3 (8 cores, 3.6GHz) with Wraith cooler
• Motherboard: MSI AMD Ryzen X570 A PRO AM4 PCIe 4.0 ATX
• GPU: NVidia GeForce RTX 2060 6GB
• RAM: Corsair 32Gb 2666MHz
• System disk: Samsung 980 PRO 500GB M.2 PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD
• Work Disk: Samsung 980 PRO 500GB M.2 PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD
• DVD Writer: Asus DRW-24D5MT 24x
• Backup Disk: Seagate Barracuda 2Tb 7200RPM
• PSU: Thermaltake Litepower 550W 80 Plus

These are not cutting edge components at the time of construction and the design is a little unconventional:

1. I have two identical NVMe disks both of which run at full PCIe 4.0 speed. C: (System) has Windows, Programs, Swap and Adobe Cache files. W: (Work) has user documents and current active project files. The Samsung Magician disk software measured 6674/5020 MB/s for sequential Read/Write which is 29 times faster than the 7200RPM convential drive.
2. I built in a SATA Power Switch that sits in a 5.25" bay and normally leave the Backup Disk powered off. This makes it quieter, saves power and means it will stay safe if I ever get clobbered with Ransomware (and it will last forever).
3. I struggled to find a case to put it in that wasn't 80% fresh air. In the end it went in an Antec VSK4000B which was the smallest ATX case I could find with 5.25" bays. It's low budget so I put a BeQuiet PWM fan in to keep the noise down and have some sound deadening foam on order but it is probably unnecessary. Cases are either Gaming (No 5.25" bays and see-through) or humungous (space for 8 drives which is daft when the main drives are the size of a stick of RAM sitting on the Motherboard). Case manufacturers haven't caught up...

[Bill Sprague]

Thanks!  It will be fun to look at buying options.

[HOTELECHOMIKE]

Since a few months I have a new PC with AMD Ryzen 5 3400G CPU (onboard Radeon Vega graphics), 32 GB RAM and a 1 TB SSD.

Thus no GPU hardware rendering - however I don't think one should concentrate too much on this feature as in my experience working with HD videos the rendering button does not take too long - at least not with 4 cores / 8 threads.

GPU hardware rendering does not help anyway with the rendering when exporting the final video - which also goes at reasonable speed.

[Headwesty]

Well the nerdy stats above show that the GPU does get used in final rendering.  It's fair to say that Task Manager reported it as 'GPU Copy' rather than 'GPU Encode' but it was still running between 70-95% so must have been doing something useful even if it was only shifting gazillions of pixels around!  The premise of this topic is that Premiere Pro does now use the GPU for final rendering so here's hoping...