M1 Macbook Pro Rendering (15.4.1) 4k... SLOW

[Tuwandap]

I have a 30min 4k, H.264 no third party plugins, with at max 5 transitions and it took 2hr 26min to complete.  I have been speaking with Adobe Care by way of Twitter, and not much assistance.  The "expert" told me 4k is large files, that is correct.  I need to make sure all other application that use up memory are closed. (i.e. Chrome). This same video, on my Windows PC took 20min with streaming Netflix (16GB RAM).  The M1 from what I reveiwed should not need me to close other apps to get the benefits of the faster rendering.  Something is not right with this upgrade.  No one is helping.  Is there a setting I need to ensure is turned on or off?  Please help.

[Warren Heaton]

There would be a difference in image quality if your camera original footage was ProRes to begin with.

H264/H265 compresses between the frames as well as within the frame and may also may be 4:2:0 color sampling.  There's no putting that back once it's gone.  

Even if you had uncompressed RAW camera original footage, conforming to a CODEC that is good for editing is about speed and reliability. 

[stalechipsco]

Unfortunately, it didn't improve the speed.

I changed the settings to export as mentioned.

ProResProxy 422. Still took over an hour.

Any other tricks? Am I missing something?

[Warren Heaton]

For the speed gain, your source footage needs to be ProRes,  myour sequence video preview settings need to be ProRes, and your export settings need to be ProRes.

 Once you have a ProRes edited master, you can convert that to whatever you need.

It may be worth noting that YouTube now accepts ProRes.

If your camera footagr is H264 and your delivery is social media/YouTube, I would go with ProRes422 LT.