137 Hours to export a 1 hour 4k video? This is getting ridiculous... Please help

[kevinjjjack]

This is being exported with the Pr Youtube 4k preset that comes with Pr. 16% room left on my hard drive.

Hard Drive: Seagate BarraCuda 6TB Internal Hard Drive HDD - 3.5 Inch SATA 6 Gb/s 5400 RPM 256MB Cache

GPU: RTX 2060 Super

System:

I have no idea what to do, but I know this isn't normal.

[Andy 1968]

Is 16% free space on you HD enough? I don't know what codec you are using to render.

[kevinjjjack]

H264 1 pass 40mb. There's over a TB of space on the disk.

[RjL190365]

Is that the ONLY disk that you have in your entire desktop PC? You see, a single HDD that's used for everything is woefully insufficient. In fact, performance-wise, that single HDD cannot sustain even 90 MB/s in overall disk I/O  throughput when tasked with simultaneous reads and writes. And since that disk is only 16% free, that concurrent disk I/O throughput drops even further - to around 32 MB/s! You need a second disk, preferably a solid state drive (SSD).

[kevinjjjack]

I have other disks - plus several new externals that have not been opened. My main OS disk is SSD, but that's all that's on there is my OS and software. I have another external SSD I could clear out and use solely for exports. Would that work? Or do I need to have the whole project on the SSD?

[Ann Bens]

Looks an awfull lot like this issue:

https://community.adobe.com/t5/premiere-pro/5-days-to-export-a-4k-9-hour-video-is-this-normal/m-p/11...

You need to get yourself some decend hard drives as in SSD.

[kevinjjjack]

Yet if I change it to ProresHQ and "pre render" it to smart render it exports in under an hour. The file size is just way too big too upload to Youtube.

[basil1891]

At least you know now that it's not a some unknown issue, but just encoder. Have you tried to switch between SW/HW-acceleration? Any difference? What about HEVC, does it work?

If anything, you can transcode ProRes via external encoder, like this:
ffmpeg.exe -hide_banner -y -i "input.mov" -pix_fmt yuv420p -c:v libx264 -tune film -crf 18 -c:a aac -b:a 320k "output.mp4"