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How to Export Faster

Participant ,
Jul 27, 2011 Jul 27, 2011

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I've been trying scores of ways to render faster the last week.  I'm working on an on-going series that is heavy on effects.  It's a kids show, so there's all kinds of AE dynamic links, effects, transitions, the works.

It's a 28 minute show broken up into 3 PP projects of about 9 minutes each.

The VERY VERY best I've been able to come up with is 2 hrs. to render each of the 9 minute clips.

I'm desperate for help since I feel I have done everything anyone's ever suggested and have read hundreds (thousands?) of posts to streamline this.  Thanks for everyone's help (Jim, Colin, Bill, Jeff, Harm, and the other top-10 guys and everyone else).  The info has been most useful.  I'm closer, but I'm still not there.  I've got lots of these shows to do, and they are all rushes, so I really need to make my workflow faster for this project to work.

Here's what I've done to get to the point I'm at, but at this point, I don't know what more to do to make my final exports faster.  Tell me if any of the below is overkill, not enough, stupid, etc.

  1. I made the mistake of dynamically linking all my AE comps that were heavy renders into PP.  I learned the hard way.  (E.g. a 30 second clip takes 4 hours in AE to render).  So to "fix" that, I now export all my complicated AE comps as TIFF sequences and import the TIFF sequence into Premiere.  My thought is that there is nothing to render/calculate other than joining a bunch of pictures together.  But this poses another problem.  I can't have real time playback, so...
  2. I then render everything in the timeline using Cineform High HD setting.  Now I have real time playback and lossless-enough-for-me rendered video.  This adds time to the building-of-the-project process, but it's supposed to pay off in the end when I don't have to spend so much time exporting.
  3. Then I export the project making sure to use the preview files that Premiere/Cineform create in an effort to save time on the final export.  This helps A LOT as it takes my formally 8 hour Premiere export to 2 hrs.  A great improvement, but not enough.
  4. Pull my hair out wondering why it's taking 2 hours to render a 9 minute clip.  This is ridiculous, IMO.  When I send it to AME it takes 2:30, so I just render in Premiere.

I'm currently rendering from the Cineform preview files and exporting to h.264 (mp4) at pretty low quality/size (around 9/100) so I can post it on Viemo.  Not sure if the transcoding is what's chewing up all my time, but I thought that having my entire timeline green, rendered and ready to roll was supposed to do the trick.  Really, what's to calculate?  My transitions, effects, AE comps are already burned into the Cineform previews.  Why does it take 1:40 hrs. to export out just 9 minutes of finished video?

My hardware pretty much follows the book and Harm's suggestions.  I'm on a blazing machine, i7 980x with 24 gigs ram, GTX480 card, W7 Ultmate 64.  Sitting on a 4-disc Raid-0 on a different location than my OS which is different from my scratches, blah, blah, yada, yada.  It's pretty much by the book completely.

9 minutes of Cineform to h.264 taking almost 2 hours can't possibly be right, can it?  There is no calculating other than the codec conversion, right?  My entire timeline is green.


What can I do differently?  What am I doing wrong?

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correct answers 1 Correct answer

Adobe Employee , Mar 26, 2016 Mar 26, 2016

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Participant ,
Jul 27, 2011 Jul 27, 2011

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hello,

don't know if this will help because you have to spend money

i am looking into it myself: main concept suite professional includes

an h264 encoder that utilizes the gpu

i'm trying to get more info on it...

maybe it'll work

encoding is so cpu intensive, isn't it?

j

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Enthusiast ,
Jul 28, 2011 Jul 28, 2011

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We render to animation codec from After Effects and drop that in as a replacement movie file.   Having the system open, read, close lots of tiff files could be expensive in terms of file I/O time.  Always REDUCE the number of files rather than increasing them.   File Open/Close is generally much more expensive time wise then simply reading the next frame from an already open file.

Exporting 9 mins to H264 on my (8 core Xeon 16GB) takes only a few minutes, not hours.

I'm assuming you are checking the box for "use previews" to save time, otherwise rendering your timeline won't make much difference (in fact it will cost you time).   We never bother rendering the timeline and let it do the rendering as it exports.

If you are checking the Maximum Quality box then that will add lots of time too.  We generally only need that is downsizing for DVD etc.

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Advocate ,
Jul 28, 2011 Jul 28, 2011

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On the off chance that the export to h.264 is the bottlenack...how about creating a less compressed master file (like Prores or something similar) that you can keep for archival purposes and then convert THAT file to h.264 using a hardware  conversion device as suggested by the previous responder.

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LEGEND ,
Jul 28, 2011 Jul 28, 2011

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What can I do differently?

Compare these times on a short, effects-heavy segment of the timeline. Make sure to add the render time to the export time:

  1. No rendering preview files.  Export to H.264 using your desired final output settings.
  2. Render preview files. Export to H.264.  Select Use Preview Files.
  3. Render preview files. Select the Match Sequence Settings checkbox.  Select Use Preview Files. (You'll get a Cineform HD file)
  4. No rendering preview files. Export to Cineform HD. Import the Cineform AVI file and export it to H.264 final.

I think you'll find that 3 is the fastest, but is useless for final delivery.  2 and 4 should be about the same, with 4 maybe being a little faster.  But 1 will be faster than both 2 and 4.

-Jeff

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New Here ,
Aug 02, 2011 Aug 02, 2011

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I'm currently trying out this threads suggestions. I'm working speficially with: " 3. Render preview files. Select the Match Sequence Settings checkbox.  Select Use Preview Files. (You'll get a Cineform HD file)".

This works best with my workflow, as it consists of cutting in render heavy animations.

My question is should not this method be the most "instant" on the AME end, or rather why would AME still be taking hours to export an already rendered timeline?

Any info you could share would be great. Maybe I'm just totally misunderstanding the process & am expecting too much from my machines

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Participant ,
Aug 03, 2011 Aug 03, 2011

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Compare these times on a short, effects-heavy segment of the timeline. Make sure to add the render time to the export time:

  1. No rendering preview files.  Export to H.264 using your desired final output settings.
  2. Render preview files. Export to H.264.  Select Use Preview Files.
  3. Render preview files. Select the Match Sequence Settings checkbox.  Select Use Preview Files. (You'll get a Cineform HD file)
  4. No rendering preview files. Export to Cineform HD. Import the Cineform AVI file and export it to H.264 final.

Thanks, Jeff, for the suggestions.  I have tested it out thoroughly and I'm convinced that "use preview files" does absoultely nothing to speed up export times.

I have posted my results here for review http://forums.adobe.com/message/3839695#3839695.  Hopefully I'm wrong in some area.  I'm very disappointed in the results since I was betting on using previews as being my time saver, but clearly this isn't happening.... at least not with Cineform.

My testing results show that there is virtually no difference between using preview files or not.  The results further show that (in my opinion) Premiere completely ignores your preview files upon export.  See the above post I cite for my reasons for saying that.

Any other suggestions would be greatly apprecaited.

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LEGEND ,
Aug 04, 2011 Aug 04, 2011

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Read your "results" post.  Unfortunately, I don't think the tests as you set them up provide good information.  First, you need a timeline that matches your source footage, and is heavily-laden with non-accelerated effects.  I didn't see any such test in your results post, but it's possible that I missed it.

The reason that you need a lot of non-accelerated effects on the clips is to ensure that the rendering of effects occupies more of the CPU's time than the encoding to H.264, which is CPU-intensive and not assisted by the GPU.

The purpose of the tests I outlined is to force the CPU to work really hard to render effects when rendering the sequence, and when exporting without using preview files.  So if you encode to H.264 and the actual encoding to that format is an order of magnitude harder for the CPU than rendering the effects on the timeline, then it won't matter whether you used preview files or not.  The time to export will be almost completely dependent on how long it takes the CPU to encode to H.264.

-Jeff

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LEGEND ,
Jul 28, 2011 Jul 28, 2011

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What are the sequence and export settings?

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Participant ,
Jul 28, 2011 Jul 28, 2011

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I'll run some of the tests mentioned above, but here's my settings per Jim's request:

seqset.JPGexportsett.JPG

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Enthusiast ,
Jul 29, 2011 Jul 29, 2011

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Try "Use Sequence Settings" and then compress that large movie with Handbrake. I can virtually guarantee it'll be faster. Everything green in your timeline just has to be copied into a new movie file.

(Your bitrate settings are crazy, btw. Avg of 7, max of 40? Please use the Vimeo HD preset.)

Have you checked this out?

http://vimeo.com/help/compression

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Adobe Employee ,
Mar 26, 2016 Mar 26, 2016

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