Footage Size Impacts Rendering Speed?

[Tim Lopes]

Hello, I am having an issue with using GPU Acceleration to render my videos and I noticed a trend for my problem. Basically, I was rendering a video that uses 2 different footage files, one that is 14GB and the other that is 7GB in size. I noticed when it was rendering the 14GB footage it was rendering at around 2-3 frames per second (very very slow). I checked my Task Manager and it showed Adobe Media Encoder was only using 6-8% of my GPU. However at a specific percentage that speed jumped up to around 15-20 frames per second and now my Task Manager shows AME using 25-30% GPU. I look back at the timeline in Premiere Pro and the percentage it sped up is the same place where the footage switches from the 14GB file to the 7GB file. 

One thing I can think of is that these files are located on an external HDD which is where all of my editing files are. Could the Write/Read speed of this HDD be the cause of this issue? Another possibility is I recently updated my NVIDIA Drivers without restarting but at this point (8 hours into rendering with about 5 hours left) I'm too afraid to restart my PC risking having to re-render at the same speed.

Specs:
Processor: Intel Core i7-8700K @ 3.70 GHz
GPU: GeForce RTX 2080 Ti
RAM: 16GB

[MyerPj]

I think it's pretty universal in the PP community to have data on an SSD, spinning drives are just not fast enough. So, yeah, could be. You're not overdoing the ram either, but definitely take care of the drive first. If you have one, put the files on it and try it. Otherwise you can add a small one for not too much $.

[Tim Lopes]

Moved my clips to my internal SSD and got the same results, thanks for the reply though!

[Michael Grenadier]

you might want to learn the "smart render" workflow.  You set your preview format in your sequence settings to a high quality format like prores422hq and render your sequence BEFORE you export.  You can review your sequence and make sure everythings ok.  When you export, export to that same format and make sure the "use previews" option is checked.  After exporting, you can then use adobe media encodeer to transcode to your delivery format (if it's different from your preview format).  

And make sure you have a minimum of 10% free space on your media drive and 20% on your startup drive.  Drive read and write speeds slow down as the drive gets full.  And yes, MyerPJ is right, SSD's are ideal, but gotta tell you, I've got an SSD for my startup drive but most (but not all) my media drives are not.  

[Sami Succar]

It's not so much the file size that affects rendering speed as much as the video codec / frame size / bitrate. Some codecs are "heavier" to transcode than others.

[Tim Lopes · Accepted solution]

Downgraded Premiere Pro to v 13.1.5 and rendering speeds are back to normal. Was working on a new project that had a 26GB file and on v14.6 it was taking well over an hour to render just 14 minutes. On 13.1.5 it is currenty only taking 14 minutes. Also, checked the Task Manager and now its finally using 90%+ of my CPU and 30% of GPU.