How long is it supposed to take to make a proxy?

Report · May 03, 2018

I have a Intel i7-7700k and a GTX 1050

I'm trying to edit episode of a TV show which I originally downloaded in MKV format (that I remuxed to MP4) and which were encoded with HEVC.

Supposedly, the HEVC codec is the reason why the editing is so sluggish and the playback keeps stuttering so I'm trying to use proxies. However it takes close to 2 hours for media encoder to create a proxy out of the 20 minute 480p episode. Is this normal?

Report · May 03, 2018

Depends totally on the hardware used to make that proxy. What's your gear? OS/CPU/RAM/GPU/vRAM, and the drive types/connectios used in the project & media ...

Neil

Report · May 03, 2018

Here is the full story.

So I'm trying to edit a 480p 20 minute long MKV file. However, when I put that file into Premiere, playback was very slow/sluggish/non-existent. It was unusable for editing.

At first I thought that it was because Premiere doesn't accept MKV so i re-muxed it into MP4. However, the problem persisted and I found out that Premiere does accept MKV after all.

Then I did some more research and found out that the most likely culprit for the sluggishness is the fact that the video is encoded in HVEC which is a highly compressed codec. That probably explains why the audio worked perfectly in playback but the video was completely broken.

So I decided to try making proxies out of the original file and editing with that since it should be a lot quicker. However, one proxy takes 2 hours per 20 minute MKV file.

So I decided to try transcoding the file with Media Encoder into a different codec (h.264) while suffering some quality loss.

This seemed to finally fix the problem. When importing my newly transcoded h.264 file into Premiere, I could edit it nice and smoothly, both video and audio.

Until I got past 10 minutes into the file...

For the first 10 minutes everything is fine and the trancoded video is playing back as it's supposed to. However, after around the 10 minute mark or so, the video portion loops back to the beginning while the audio portion keeps playing.

So like at minute 15, it's the audio for minute 15 but the video for minute 5. I tried both trancoding it to GoPro Cineform and h.264.

The problem persists. I can even see it start to loop in the output preview of media encoder. Is this a problem with my source file or a problem with Media Encoder? Is there any way to fix this?

All of this is from me trying to edit a simple MKV HVEC file. That file format is extremely common. I don't understand what I'm doing wrong. I've been trying to fix this root problem for like 2 days.

My system is Windows 10, Intel i7-7700k, GTX 1050 (2GB vRam). 16GB Ram. Do you have any advice at all?

Report · May 03, 2018

Never done anything with mkv files ... I know in certain work it is common, like archivists ... but it's not common among general video editors. So ... the mkv was in HEVC?

Neil

Report · May 03, 2018

Thats correct

Report · May 03, 2018

You've really had some fun here, haven't you? Ahem ...

I'm wondering if you go to ME, bring up the original file into the queue, then go to the Export settings dialog, what happens if you set a range of the video? As you've got the first half, maybe set the in at or just before the previous export starts to loop, and export from there to the end?

At least if you can, you're working on this project.

Neil