Premiere Pro taking forever to render any amount of video/graphics

Report · Dec 21, 2020

Hi all,

I'm sure this question gets asked here a lot, but I can't figure out what's wrong. For background, I have a GeForce 2070 Super for my graphics card and a 3900x Ryzen for a CPU (with nearly a TB of space on my SSD). Premiere worked super speedy at first, but now it's god awful slow. To put in perspective, it takes about 5-7 minutes to render a basic 9 second graphic from Adobe Stock. Yes, CUDA is enabled. I'll only have one project opened at a time. The whole reason I build this PC was so it can work Premiere easily, but clearly this isn't the case. Any help?

Report · Dec 21, 2020

Many graphics templates aren't well optimized for fast render. Do you have the same slowdown in rendering other parts of the timeline?

Report · Dec 21, 2020

If you've got only the one drive, that is A MASSIVE problem right there. Even with SSDs, it's far better to have say a drive for OS/programs, another for cache/preview files ONLY, and a third for media/projects. If you can, split the latter into two discs ... one for media, one for project files/exports.

Yea, the discs are faster ... but the media files and demands within the software are also higher.

Neil

Report · Dec 21, 2020

I've had computers with much older hardware and a single drive (with much less space) render videos much more quickly. Sure, in a perfect world I would shell out another $800 for drives, but there is basically nothing on my drive outside of the OS and Premiere. It should not be running this slow even with a single drive.

Report · Dec 22, 2020

default9vvcyoqmh88r

I agree. I can use a SATA SSD or an M.2 SSD and play multiple layers of any 4K codec. I can also render 15 minute long 4K sequneces in less than five minutes. Adding another M.2 SSD is not going to help. That being said there are some motherboards that have glitchy M.2 ports.

Keep in mind your OS and Premier Pro are stored in RAM. I used to have a video where I pulled out the drive with the Windows OS and my computer still worked as it should.

Report · Dec 22, 2020

I have 32 gigs of Ram. Nothing else open but Premiere.

Report · Dec 21, 2020

I agree with Neil. Some guy here posted some article about computers and editing a while back that compared the process to going food shopping.

I'll use the same analogy.

Neil's point is you got one drive doing everything ( a drive seeks and writes.. 2 functions that go through the cpu (and sometimes gpu) and ram, etc.)

The seek and write time ( specs for ssd in your case ) means a lot... but that's part of another issue later.

So, with one drive you got a guy going into store to food shop. He gets a can of soup. He goes to the cash register person. He does transaction (pays) and goes out of store. Then he comes right back into store and buys another can of soup. He does that for every item of food he wants. He is seeking (getting the frame) and writing (checking it out ). One frame at a time.

With more drives ( let's say 4... OS AND PROGRAMS, SOURCE FILES, CACHE FILES, EXPORTS)

you now have 4 people going into store ... one guy picks out soup, other guy runs to cashier, other guy stores soup in car, other guy runs back in store to get the next item...

Much faster.

The other issue... hardware and resolutions and codecs.....

An ant can carry 10 times it's weight... our supermarket guy can too, but it's heavy if the can of soup weighs more than the shopper, it's gonna take some time to get to the cashier.

That weight can be measured in bitrates, dimensions, codecs, and so on.

And if the hardware is not great ( shopping guy is using a walker ) that's an issue.

hehe, good luck.

Report · Dec 21, 2020

I get the analogy when it comes to getting the absolute best performance out of Premiere. My frustration is that it still should not be running this poorly on a nearly $2,500 PC. I've used older computers with single drives that ran it better. Premiere is basically the only thing on the drive outside of the OS. My hardware in my computer should be more than enough to run the program smooth as butter. Is there any option outside of CUDA that could speed up the rendering process, or are graphics always a major pain? I should also mention that it's only 1080p.

Report · Dec 21, 2020

I'd suggest to use task manager to monitor resources during that slow render. If there is not a single component that has > 50% load you can brush aside any suggestions about "weak" hardware.
And so you can start looking for software issues, it can be some Adobe settings, system drivers, bug(s) in Premiere, and of course general lack of code optimization. The latter is not unusual. We all can notice how Adobe just rises minimal system requirements with each major version, plus uses it's subscribers as beta testers, which also says a lot.

Report · Dec 22, 2020

Salvo34,

I get great performance if I use one single SATA SSD or one single M.2 SSD. Unless the Windows Taskmanger shows the drive being pegged at 100% the drive is probaly not the issue. That being said I have heard some AMD boards have glitchy M.2 ports. If the hard drive is 98% full that can also cause problems.

When I see long render times it is often an AMD CPU and Nvidia GPU.

Report · Dec 21, 2020

Dump all your cache/cache database and preview files. Let Premiere remake things.

Considering what Premiere is doing when it's working, that it works on a single-drive system hardly at all is a wonder. It is doing a ton of reading/writing and searching the drives in use constanstly.

With only one drive, it can only do so much at the same time ... period. That drive can't be reading/writing from 10 places at once continually. And like the cameras and computer hardware, the software is constantly updated to do more stuff. And as the software is updated, the computer needs more oomph to drive it.

For $800, you could get several 250GB to 500GB SSDs, by the bye.

Neil

Report · Dec 21, 2020

If I understand right the original poster's problem is with rendering graphics elements and that shouldn't be related deeply to hard drives as he's rendering 9 seconds of graphics in 5-7 minutes, so for me, it looks like this is a problem with a poorly optimized graphics template for rendering (or it includes really heavy visual elements with a lot of effects)

Report · Dec 21, 2020

Correct. In general, it doesn't take nearly as long to render video. It's any graphic that's premade in Adobe Stock that seems to take absolutely forever to render - even if it's mere seconds.

Report · Apr 29, 2022

There is still the problem in 2022. I have been using graphics/elements/lower thirds etc from other content sites and just yesterday I did a whole project using ADOBE stock imaging and the whole process went to hours of rendering. It's the Adobe stock imaging. Believe me guys, I have 32GB and all i7 processing and all that stuff on powerful PC. Never had this problem until yesterday. I'm just not going to use Adobe stock-I have a computer built for this stuff and have had ZERO rendering issues for over three years until now.

Report · Apr 29, 2022

One of those things that's really puzzling. A lot of users can work with the Adobe stock mogrts without issue, may have troubles with ones acquired "out in the wild". And some don't seem to have problems with the outside ones, but have issues with Adobe stock mogrts.

What ... the ... ?

I know in your situation and others, the stock ones are an issue. They work great on my laptop and desktop. Why the difference? No clue. Frustrating.

Neil

Report · Dec 21, 2020

The $800 was supposed to be sarcastic. I'd really rather not drop that kind of money just to get a single software to work. I'd like to mention that in many of these cases, the drive isn't pulling from 10 places at once. It's literally just the graphic. No video, sound, extra text, etc. I also, as mentioned before, bascially have nothing on my computer but Premiere - not even a camera. I'm not a computer hardware expert, but a near empty m4 mSATA SSD should not take that long to render a couple seconds. They're not even graphically heavy templates. If it really requires me to buy more harddrives just to render faster I will, but I seriously doubt that's the main issue.

Report · Dec 21, 2020

Being more explicit about the performance issue you're talking about, yea, that's a pain.

But knowing how this app works simply as a practical matter, single drive workflows are a pain up the wazoo. For nearly anything you'd do.

Neil

Report · Dec 22, 2020

Niel,
I can use a single drive with no issues at all. Even the old mechanical hard drives.

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I see problems with performance when there is an AMD CPU and an Nvidia GPU. Perhpas there is a conflict. Are things faster with CUDA dissabled? Are you using the RTX for encoding and decoding or just GPU acceleration?

Report · Dec 22, 2020

When putting together my PC, I made sure my CPU,GPU, and motherboard were compatible. Everything seems to be running fine in BIOS. Not sure if I'm using RTX for encoding and decoding or not. Where would I check that in Premiere? If I have it on, I would assume I should turn it off.

Report · Dec 22, 2020

The video below will show you how to enable the GPU for encoding and decoding. I understand you think the RTX 2070 and AMD CPU/motherboard are compatible but simply swithcing an audio card could work fine for gaming but cause conflicts with Premiere Pro. That being said depending on your audio hardware sometimes using the ASIO 4 All driver can help playback performance. Premiere Pro tends to need extra tweeking.

Report · Dec 22, 2020

default,

First of all. Sorry for the hassle. You said, "Premiere worked super speedy at first, but now it's god awful slow."

Are you editing with H.264 or HEVC? What happens if you use a previous version of Premiere Pro?What codec are you rendering to? Or is it the stock I-Frame MPEG? What happens if you switch the codec to something like ProRes?

I am seeing a handful of performance cases others are having based on the same CPU as you have. I would like to file a bug on your behalf if we can find a repeatable case.

Thanks for any info you can provide. My apologies once more.

Thank you,

Kevin

Kevin Monahan - Sr. Community & Engagement Strategist – Pro Video and Audio

Report · Dec 22, 2020

Hi Kevin,

Yes, you are correct. I am editing with H. 264 on the latest version of Premiere (Windows 10). It seemed to work perfectly fine up until the latest update or two ago. Unfortunately, I'm away from my computer at the moment so I can't test an older version of Premiere right now. Let me know if I can provide any more info!

Report · Dec 22, 2020

And you are rendering to MPEG I-Frame, right? Can you try ProRes when you get back and see what happens? You can engage that in Sequence Settings by choosing the Custom Editing Mode. In the choice of Editing Modes, you need to scroll all the way to the top to get that choice. Then you can set the codec for rendering the way you want to. I render to ProRes LT and never have an issue.

Thanks,
Kevin

Kevin Monahan - Sr. Community & Engagement Strategist – Pro Video and Audio

Report · Dec 22, 2020

I am not sure if you watched my video. That being said a BIOS update might not hurt. I try to avoid them but somtimes it is needed. I think with the AMD Motherboards you can get a performance boost when using AMD GPUs by tweaking the BIOS. I wonder if a BIOS setting could hurt the performance of the Nvidia GPUs. I also know some of the X570 mobos needed a few bios updates when they first launched. It is just a thought.

Report · Dec 23, 2020

Hi Kevin,

Yes, I am rendering to MPEG I-Frame. I tried ProRes and nothing really changed. The render actually got through the first 30% extremely quickly, but then it slowed to a snails pace again. I currently have the latest driver version for my GPU. Looking at other posts, perhaps it's a Nvidia driver issue?