Throttle Media Encoder

[Graham Hutchins]

Hi,

I'm on macOS 10.12.5, maxed out trashcan Mac Pro 64GB RAM, working in latest updated PP 2017.1.2 and 2015 (client is still on this version for this particular project).

I'm kicking out 20-30ish minute long 4K sequences to 1080p h.264 for review in Media Encoder 2015 and 2017 using openCL and while these are cooking, my system is barely usable, very laggy.

Is there a way to throttle Media Encoder to use less of the system so that I can continue to work while these renders are cooking?  They're taking 1-2 hours, so it'd be nice to have a usable system while they process.  I'm willing to have the renders take longer, speed of render isn't really important for this (within reason).

I've tried changing the memory usage to free up more memory for other applications (currently at 48/16 GB, Adobe/other apps) but since I'm also using PP and AE while encoding, not sure how helpful this is.

Any insight is appreciated.

Thanks!

[bucksommerkamp]

Graham,

I hear the CPU fans roaring from here.   We do lots of encoding on a NAS, which adds tons of network bandwidth usage to the mix. If you don't have to have them right away, I would queue them up and just batch the whole job overnight while you sleep. If you are uploading to any hosting sites (Vimeo, YouTube), make sure you set up those outputs (passwords, etc.) so there's one less thing to keep an eye on while it cranks.

Are you checking the "maximum render quality" box? Because I know that tends to cause a huge hit on performance and without overtly appealing results...I would leave it unchecked if you haven't already.

I don't have any other suggestions to throttle the app itself, but queuing them up for a hard run (while exiting out of other apps) might help. It's definitely some time-shifting of the workflow.

Buck

[Graham Hutchins]

Hi Buck,

Yeah, I do usually overnight when I can, but it'd be nice to have the option of background encoding.  In this particular case, I had to overnight the Resolve render and get to the conform in PP this morning.  I have my old cheese grater Mac with a direct ethernet line to the trashcan that I could offload this to, I guess, I'd be curious how the Adobe suite behaves in that scenario.

Most of the content I'm transcoding/delivering day-to-day is under 2 mins in length, but I'm doing color for a feature right now and the pieces I'm transcoding are 4K and dozens of minutes long.

I am not checking max quality.

Thanks for the suggestions, I had the thought of rendering out a native codec/resolution master to transcode on the cheese grater, but outputting the Prores master would take almost as long as the h.264 encode, since there's a 2.35 matte overlay on the sequence, necessitating a re-render anyway.

[bucksommerkamp]

Yikes - that's a fancier setup than I've ever seen. The only other thought I had was to roll up/hide the preview thumbnail window down at the bottom of AME while rendering; believe it or not, it has sped things up for me on super-intensive projects. You wouldn't think it would make any difference, but apparently not having to show thumbs and update that tiny window as it goes seems to give it some extra oomph. Maybe you've done that already.

Sorry I'm not more help!

Buck

[Graham Hutchins]

It's really nothing fancy, it just two computers networked together to share hard drives and allow me to remote desktop into one another.

Opening the PP project on the client computer seems to work, it's a little slow to start and overall it's a little slow, but not prohibitively so.  I'm sure it helps that I'm on a 4 drive RAID 5 disk for storage.  I guess that's the workflow.

Thanks for the dialog.

[grimm_ruthless]

I don't know if this is going to help you now, or at all. But I believe I figured out the answer. If you open up your Task Manager in Windows right click on Adobe media encoder, go to processes, right-click set affinity and change how many CPUs processors that this program can take. Cool thing is if you decide to walk away and want a faster render. You can simply turn them all back on and the system will ramp up

[sequence W4]

I have the same problem here...

I have a brand new Mac Mini with i7 and 64GB RAM 

if I render anything on Media Encoder it uses 100% of CPU even though I set it to only use 24GB of RAM.

I can't do any other work while Media Encoder is rendering. Chrome and even Safari stutter and movies won't play smoothly. It just tries to blast through the render with the fans running... and that isn't particularly fast either compared to my old Mac Mini 2012!

There must be a way to restrict the CPU usage... any ideas? There are no options to constrain number of cores. 

should I change the render engine?