Two issues at once: Slow pre-rendering and preview only plays audio

[Migue_Cr]

Sytem info:

HP ZBook 15 G3 Mobile Workstation

Processor: Intel(R) Core i7-6700HQ CPU @ 2.60Hz

RAM: 16 GB

NVIDIA Quadro M1000M

NVIDIA Driver version 425.31

Windows 10 Enterprise 64 bit version 1809

OS build 17763.379

BIOS Up to date

Premiere Pro Version: 13.1.1 (Build 11)

I'm learning to edit as a hobby so I'm not very tech savvy. Please be patient if I'm missing some detail about my issue. I followed several steps I found in other forums and YouTube videos. But I noticed I have more than one issue at the same time:

1. Extremely slow render times

2. Preview only plays audio

I'm working with MOV files recorded on an iPhone 7 Plus. Some days ago, after the most recent (Premiere Pro) updates I was asked to update the NVIDIA driver. Imediately after this the preview stopped working as normal. Now it only plays sound and the only way to have the video working is to pre-render.

So another issue came up, the time it takes to pre-render is incredibly large. As a reference a video 12 minutes and 18 seconds long says it would take around 9 hours to pre-render.

I updated Windows, BIOS and installed the NVIDIA driver that Premiere Pro suggested (which was a roll back from the one I had installed). Cleaned the media cache and database, removed Premiere Pro and finally made a clean install and same issue here. Both using CUDA and OpenCL as renderer. I also tried with software only but made the issue worse. I created a new project with only the 12 minute long video and issue persists.

Repeated the same steps (obviously not updating the BIOS and OS) but instead, installed the most recent version of the NVIDIA driver (this time more recent than the one I had at the very beggining). And same issues heppening. It came to my attention that checking the task manager it seems that the GPU usage level is very low.

Today at work I connected an external monitor via thunderbolt port and as a test I tried to render and it seemed to work a little faster and the GPU usage sometimes hit up to 3%. But 5 hours of rendering in the background didn't seem to be enough to finish the render. And the estimated time to finish was still 1.5 hours. But it never said that it would take the 9 hours that it stated yesterday. The top estimated time displayed was 1 hour and 35 minutes.

The good thing was that this ran in the background and didn't interfere with my normal job (didn't even have issues with Power BI which consumed up to 2.5GB of RAM at a given point).

Now, I'm back home and again it says that the estimated time to finish is around 8 hours.

I haven't tried with proxy files as I'm still learning how to get this done. But first I would like to know if this would actually help me.

I hope that someone can help me out here.

[quaglinoman]

You are not alone, Nvidia Quadro car here, Renders pausing at 1% max and the time left goes up and up and up, estimated time even hits 12 hours.

I bring the project home, using a GeForce RTX card, same settings, everything. weaker CPU. 10 minutes to render. We even had others in our office test with various Quadros, same issue.

[Migue_Cr]

Thank you for your reply. I do know that my GPU is not optimal. But I didn't understand why would it take so long after an update if this issue wasn't happening in the past. After several things I did. I found out it was some sort of compatibility issue.

Just changed the file's extentions from .MOV to .MP4 and it did the trick. Everything running smooth and fast!

Kind of weird for me. I would think Premiere Pro would do some sort of magic in the background so that this wouldn't happen but well, At least I can continue editing and I'll try to understand the tech's side of this so to understand if actually it was me who was doing something I wasn't supposed to.

[Migue_Cr · Accepted solution]

I think I might have solved this by myself.

Long story short: Swapping MOV files to MP4 did the trick and everythin now runs smooth like butter and quite fast!

How did I come up with this solution?

I noticed that there was an update for Premiere Pro, after installing it. The issue presisted. So firts I uninstalled it and manually deleted the media cache database folder, preferences folder and removed the external HDD I use for scratch disk. After running CCleaner and rebooted several times I installed Premere Pro again.

Tried creating proxy files but when importing the same files I had issues with I noticed only audio was being imported. So I looked it up in Google and found several suggestions asked to change the .MOV extention to .MP4

After doing this it did work with the proxy files as expected.

So I created a yet another new project. I used the exact same files without proxy, but now as MP4 and it blasts rendering them in around 6-7 minutes (when these files were MOV as extension Premiere Pro said would take up to 9-10 hours). Premiere Pro's CPU usage pikes around 45%, GPU around 17% and memory remains relatively low considering the amount allocated specifically to the application.

I'll have to learn a bit more about codecs, container, extentions and all that. But I thought that Premiere Pro was supposed to do all the background work so that regardless of the device the video was shot on or device being used these types of compatibility issues didn't came up. I even considered buying in thd future a Mac. But I had very clear that if I moved to Mac the would mean stop paying for Adobe's Creative Cloud membership and move to Final Cut Pro.