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Norvells
Known Participant
April 13, 2020
Question

render times & export sizes

  • April 13, 2020
  • 4 replies
  • 554 views

Hi!

To start, I am rank amature, so forgive my naivety.  

TLDR:  Reasonable file size?  What settings can I adjust to minimize file size for a 1hr 1080p video without sacrificing resolution?  Any advice on shooting editing exporting and posting long videos with a 1-2 day turnaround time?   

 

First, the story: 

I volunteered to film and produce my small church's easter service this year and may continue to do this type of vounteer work from time to time.   On Thursday I shot in 1080p using a canon m50, but also used an ipad and iphone for additional views; I edited it all together on Friday/Saturday morning (fixing some grainy shots in After Effects, re-timing the 44.1 audio from my i-devices with the 48k audio from the church's sound system; creating nice cuts and transitions, etc.) and by Saturday afternoon I was finally ready to export and upload to Youtube and the church's website.  

 

I was intending to leave it in 1080p (see settings attached) but I was shocked by the file size and export time.   For a 1hr service, it was 6400 MB.  I gulped and tried exporting.  The first 20% went fairly smoothly, but then for every 1% progress it took about 3-4 minutes and added another ~5 minutes to the ETA!   I realized that at that rate my church might not have a service for Easter, so I cut my losses after a few hours of this:  I removed all of my video effects (not that I was doing anything crazy initially), lowered the resolution to 720, lowered the audio quality and lowered the Target Bitrate.  This reduced the file to about 4000 MB.  It still took a few hours to export -and a several more to upload to Youtube.  With the lower quality and without color correction effects and smooth transitions, it felt very unpolished, but at least my church was able to watch and worship Sunday morning.  (o:  

 

Finally, my questions:  

1) Am I doing something wrong in settings, or should I simply expect my files to be this large?  

2) what settings can I use to minimize export size without sacrificing resolution?  

3) would an eGPU help?  or is my internal GPU (see specs below) sufficient?  

4) any general advice for rapid 1-2 day turnaround on shooting, editing, exporting & posting these long videos?  The actual export time isn't as critical as overall time -i.e., tactics like pre-rendering may reduce export time but don't reduce my overall time.   Thanks so much! 

 

cheers n' blessings,

Garrett

2018 Macbook pro with 2.9 GHz 6-core i9;  Mojave

32GB 2400 DDR4, Radeon Pro 560X 4GB graphics and Intel UHD Graphics 630 1536 MB

Premiere Pro 2020 and After Effects

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4 replies

Norvells
NorvellsAuthor
Known Participant
April 21, 2020

What wonderful feedback -thank you thank you!

Participant
April 21, 2020

Few more thoughts, try 720p at 60fps and honestly it looks great online while saving tons of time with editing and render sizes for faster turn around. I would still go 1080p 30fps but if  ur in a crunch 720p works.


preload the service 

if u are doing Facebook and Youtube "premier" videos (preloaded yet plays like its live) you schedule the Sunday morning start time and relax to join in and moderate the comments.

 

use a camera switcher during the recording shoot instead of making camera cuts later in adobe. No multicam cuts saves a lot of time. Especially for sermons and slides.

Community Expert
April 21, 2020

The eGPU may be helpful, especially when it comes to some of the VFX you may have been using, but I thought I would also comment on some of your other questions.

A note on export settings if you want to hopefully reduce some export time. If you're not already, use VBR 1-pass (not 2-pass). Uncheck the boxes for Maximum Depth and Max Render Quality (if you've checked them - chances are you do not need them.) If it's compatible, make sure to use the hardware renderer and not software encoding, unless you've selected software rendering to help with other issues (such as the pinned bug with 14.1).

A target bitrate of around 15Mbps is probably average for a 1080p video, with many people wanting to push that a little higher. The actual size of your video is just the bitrate * time. The sizes you were getting don't seem unreasonable for a product that long.

If you do have time throughout the process of editing to pre-render your timeline, that can be another way to speed things up when it comes time to export. I like to set my preview files to a codec matching what might be my master file when I'm done, such as ProRes 422. In certain situations when I know it'll be crunch time when it's time to export I'll use that method and then you can check the 'Use Previews' box in the Export Dialogue. It should speed up your export, especially if you create a master file with the same settings.

The only other thing I wanted to throw out there is to be careful with your iphone (and maybe ipad) video recordings. Especially when it comes to longer recordings, you may encounter audio desync due to the variable framerate inherent with those devices.

Participant
April 21, 2020

We just bought a black magic eGPU and I'm now able to render 6000mb videos at 3840resolution in about 30min to an hour

Participant
April 21, 2020

It depends on a lot of factors though but I usually render at either the "Facebook 4K" preset setting or the 1080p one. I definitely recommend uploading the video to Facebook and YouTube through your church internet unless you have awesome upload speed at home. But gotta say the black magic eGPU really helped a lot with rendering. I'm running a 2016 MacBook Pro 16g ram with the $600 eGPU.