Rendering is taking too much time

[Jackson Franca]

 I've been rendering with Premiere for a time, like rendering 1080p60 for some time and changed to 1440p60 since I've bought a new hardware device to capture my gameplays. Some render times were around 2 hours, for a 1h30m video using H265 Codec to record and render.

Recently (like 1 or 2 month ago), Premiere started to take too much time to render videos with similar length, like 6 hours to render a video with 1h40m, and also a 2 hours video took 8 hours to render it. My setup is:

CPU Ryzen 5600X

GPU NVIDIA RTX 4070

32GB RAM (Premiere can use up to 26GB)

My export settings is like this:

One thing that keeps me thinking is this option "Render" that keeps to stay grayed out and I can't changed it. I've looked through some topics and videos, and I couldn't turn it on. I've looked that Adobe have disabled it, but I guess during the render it isn't using my GPU/Hardware and is rendering through Software to take so much time.

Edited for content: Content was removed. Please do not alter the settings or condone the use of internal engineering tools. 

I've already tried reinstalling entirely the Premiere and Media Encoder, but it didn't fix anything. I don't know if it was something that Windows updated and had some impact on Premiere render times. Can you guys help me with this problem?

[Warren Heaton]

Do you have any effects applied that might be slowing down the export time?

H265 can be slow to export.  Have you tried exporting using the Match Sequence settings preset?  If you're using Premiere Pro's default settings, this will give you a ProRes 422 LT file and ProRes is fast to encode.  You could upload that (yes, the file will be really large) or transcode that to ProRes in Media Encoder.  While it's a second step, it may be faster overall than going directly to H264.

[Jackson Franca]

Hello Warren!! No, I don't have many effects, only Dissolve in the first and last 3s of the video itself. I started to have some problems after Premiere updated alongside Windows, and it started to take too much time to render anything. I'm using the same preset to export as I ever used (YT_PRESET_1) and you can see through the images the options that I've chose.

ProRes is only available on Macs or is it available to Windows too? Since I prefer to render on my Desktop.

[Rabih_Sleiman8490]

Your long render times likely happen because Premiere isn’t using your GPU — the “Renderer” option being greyed out means it’s stuck in software mode.

Fix summary:

1. Update NVIDIA drivers (use Studio Driver).

2. In Project Settings → General, make sure Renderer = Mercury Playback Engine GPU Acceleration (CUDA).

3. In export settings, set Performance = Hardware Encoding.

4. Reset Premiere preferences and clear media cache.

5. In NVIDIA Control Panel, set Premiere to use your RTX 4070 with “Prefer maximum performance.”

6. Check Task Manager → GPU → Video Encode during render — if it’s 0%, GPU isn’t being used.

These steps usually restore normal (fast) render times.

[Jackson Franca]

Hello Rabih!

I've already done these steps before I post here, because I was looking for any kind of solution. The GPU use does increase (between 70 up to 99%), but the time to render it remains too high (around 5~7 hours for video 2 hours long and 1440p60fps).

The following image is regarding how Premiere is set to use my GPU.

Preferência por desempenho máximo = Prefer maximum performance

When I clear the preferences and everything else, the Performance (Desempenho) changes back to "Software". As you can see in the following image:

And when this happens, I open the Debug Console and Activate these following options to be able to choose "Hardware Encoding" (Acelerado por hardware):

I don't know what's happen when I start to render, because it appears that it changes back in the background to "Software" to take so long, since it doesn't make any sense to take so long to render even using GPU. And when I do render, I just let Premiere open alone, no other program along with it.

When I'm using the GPU to render, it should use its memory too? Because the memory use didn't go up so much, it remained around 4.4GB of 12GB available