Render times are significantly slowed by the 14.4 (and beyond) update!

[Th3Birdman]

Title.

Apparently, this isn't a "Known Issue" to Adobe because they have released two updates without addressing this issue.

Hardware encoding for version 14.3 is SIGNIFICANTLY faster than 14.4 and 14.5, upwards to literally 5x times faster. Have been trying to render a  couple videos the past couple days and the render times were out of this world slow (a 2 hour video took 5 1/2 hours to render!). I checked my task manager to find my CPU's (9900k) utilization was around 10%! Even worse, my GPU's (2080ti) utilization was at 20%.

These updates have ruined encoding times, because they severely underutilize the CPU and GPU. The solution is to downgrade from 14.5/14.4 to at least 14.3.2. 

I hope I have helped solve an issue for people like me who were wondering why the heck were rendering times so bad. Please fix this!!!

[Th3Birdman]

The person who replied below you, translated from French-- "The problem is still the same on my end".

It's clear that Adobe has not addressed this problem in the past 5 updates because they seem to not even KNOW there is a problem. 

With shills like that one guy telling us all there is a problem with our systems (even though our systems work completely fine on 14.3.2), of course Adobe isn't taking a look at this problem. They don't have to if people are going to apologize whenever the topic is broached, and pretend that there isn't an issue. Glad to see my thread has reached as many people as it did, and hopefully it has saved you some headaches with render times. 

Again, the current workaround is to simply downgrade versions to 14.3.2, the last version where hardware encoding was working properly. 

[drm production]

Hello Th3Birdma, even downgrading to version 14.3.2   I still have the same problem. Do you do a complete uninstall before reverting to this version? Or just downdrade your premiere 14.9 --> 14.3.2.

Thanks, And good luck to many of us who run into this problem, I think this post needs to be put together.

Alex

AMD Ryzen 9 3950X 16 cœurs 3,50 GHz
64 RAM
NVIDIA TITAN RTX

[RjL190365]

No. Simply downgrading will not fix this problem. You must completely uninstall the installed later version first, then install the older version from scratch.

For the same reason, I no longer perform in-place updates within a major version, as some files between versions would have conflicted. In-place updates to Premiere Pro all too often leave a mix of both older and newer versions of many files, some of which do not play well with one another. So, I now make a habit of uninstalling all older point versions before trying to update to a newer point version.

[huggyhomer]

Welp, I had to reinstall Windows 10 and I guess recently Adobe Creative Cloud doesn't show 14.3.2 as another version to install. Only 15 and 14.9. Back to slow renders until this is fixed.

[DAVID5FC3]

You are exactly right - latest drivers, latest version of PP and ME = super slow NVENC render times. Uninstalled and reinstalled 14.3.2, renders got fast again. Sorry you had to deal with being one of the first ones to run across this and draw the ire of others on the forum blaming your hardware. Thank you for taking the arrows for those of us that ran into the same issue - you saved me A TON of time!!

[notkic]

Just piling onto this: 100% as OP says. Downgraded from whatever I had installed (14.8? I hate updating Premiere for exactly this reason since it's not the first time I've seen drastic performance loss between versions) to 14.3.2 and my render speed increased 300%. I've tried multiple different test sequences and they were all processed in 1/3 of the time or less.

This is a brand new computer with a fresh install of Windows. It's not a drivers issue. It's not file/settings corruption. It's Premiere/Media Encoder needing another severe kick in the encoding pants.

For what it's worth, I'm using a 5800x and 6900 xt. I was this --> <-- close to yanking the 6900 xt and popping my 2080ti into the machine because I thought it was the Radeon that was the issue. Whether the Nvidia card is faster than the AMD card at rendering in Premiere/ME I don't know, but the issue isn't the card in this case: it's Adobe.

It's frustrating to see how old this post is and how many new versions have come out that don't address this issue.

[R Neil Haugen]

This is one of those incredibly frustrating situations. I'm on a new machine, 24 core Ryzen with 128GB of RAM and a 2080Ti, with mostly internal Nvme and SSD drives for all system/programs, cache, projects, media, and export drives. And it's running fast both with PrPro and Me for encodes and pretty decent for decodes.

And there are others with either new or old kit getting good export times and utilizations. So clearly, on some systems and workflows, the newer versions can scream along.

That said, there are many who are clearly getting crappy export & utilization times & numbers with the newer versions. Far worse than with an older one.

It would be so good if the development team could get a good handle on this and tell us users where those differences come, and help get everyone "up to speed".

For EVERYONE with performance issues, the place they gather data is their UserVoice page. Every post there is read & logged by at least one engineer, and yes, I've talked with one of the guys doing so. His biggest complaint is too many posts don't have enough data. So give them your full specs: OS/CPU/RAM/GPU, types of drives involved, effects used, media used, and exports to what format/codecs. The differences between X version of PrPro and the current version.

Don't expect a reply, that's not a 'communication' place ... it's a data-input place. They sometimes reply, though I think most often direct rather than via comments in any posting.

Every post there also goes in collated form to the all-important M&E folks up well above the program teams. Those are the people who have the most say over budgets and features and such, and they work it seems totally by "metrics". The UV page is the one place we users can give them metrics.

Neil

[iLuh]

Thank you for your answer!

I already posted there: https://adobe-video.uservoice.com/forums/911233-premiere-pro/suggestions/42890427-check-both-premier...

Let's cross fingers!

[drm production]

Hello everyone, do you have the CPU problem solved with the new version 15?

Thank you for your feedback.

Alexander.

[R Neil Haugen]

You'd have to test, which is easy enough to do. Render times seem to be all over the place. My 24-core Ryzen is quite happy, some others apparently not so much. Why? Dunno.

So ... install the 15.x without removing the 14.x you're using, import some media in a NEW project, and test it. Only way you'll know for sure it's working on your rig. So many freaking variables right now.

Neil

[Kevin-Monahan]

Hi Alexander,

The problem suffered by the OP is largely due to GPU decoding bottlenecking the system. It was found that allowing the CPU to do the decoding (in Preferences > Media) and the GPU to do the encoding can solve most people's problems (but your mileage may vary). Can you try that and let us know?

Thanks,
Kevin

[FlyingFourFun]

Kevin; I suggested this as a area to focus his testing back on Nov 23rd,  he replied that he tested it and it made no difference.  I had commented that was a surpise as the utlization percentages should in fact change when you make the change to CPU decode.   I am delighted that Adobe (I assume) is seeing some evidence of this slow down effect and can attribute at least some of the cases to the choice in decoder (CPU/GPU) as you indicated.   Seems like an edge case as when I tested it, there variance was not 5x but rather very small percentages.  I am wondering if certain video cards / drivers combinations are more effected than others, do you have additional technical insights?

With that said,  I hope that with the percise suggestion you provided it yeilds some results for those affected.  My interest is further peaked in the hopes that Adobe might look into a tool to evaluate which systems it could recomend which setting to use for best results.  I have left my system on GPU encode/decode as its very rare that I can spike both encode/decode to 100% each, if I have a long render, and I see that, I stop it and switch to CPU decode and it is faster (but not 5x).

Thanks for the follow through on this topic.

[GRKN_YT]

I'd just like to add that I also have the same issue that Th3Birdman described.

With the newer versions, render times are horrible.  

My system is a Ryzen 9 3900x with a 1080ti and 32 gb ram.  Upgraded to Premiere v15.0 just to see if this problem had been fixed after sticking to v14.3 for a while now, and the same problem persists.

Allowing the CPU to do the decoding as Kevin suggested did nothing in my case.

Hopefully this gets fixed soon.  Thank you Th3Birdman and everyone else for bringing this issue to attention.

[Will5C9F]

So I have managed to make it work and actually better than it did on 14.3 with 14.9 and 15.0 following some of the suggestions from Kevin. The settings were slightly different for 14.9 from 15.0 so I will describe what worked for 15.0 for me. It will only work if I specifically have the menu option file\project settings\geneal video render and playback section set to CUDA (I believe with 14.9 I had this set to software but everything else was the same.) Then in the edit\preferences\media I have the option for H264/HEVC Decoding option completely unchecked (all 3 boxes) and the H264/HEVC Encoding option checked. With these settings now not only am I back to my normal export times but it actually boosted them from what would have taken 7-10 min before is taking 4-5 min now. I went from 20%-30% CPU usage max to 80%-100% and GPU went from a max of 15% to 40% now. This is much better. 

[NikVladi]

I confirm that everything above 14.3.2 is just crap. Including 15.0, 15.1 beta and 15.2 beta.

AMD Ryzen 9 5950X, 128 GB 3200 MHz, Radeon RX590, MSI b550 Tomahawk, SDD.

4K, x264, 100 mbit, Software Encoding.

Above version 14.3.2:

CPU load - 5%, video card load - 3%.
Export 3 minutes time-lapse video - 40 minutes.

Version 14.3.2:

CPU load - 100%, video card load - 80%.
Export 3 minutes time-lapse video - 5 minutes.

[basil1891]

@NikVladi  Did you do all required staff after version update, like cache clearing and reset of PP preferences?

[NikVladi]

Yes, I did it.

In the case of version 15.0, I even reinstalled Windows 10.

Just to check. Nothing changed.