Premiere Pro suddenly taking EXTREMELY long to export very simple 'Ken Burns' stills video

[Philbird]

Hi folks,

In my job I often export very simple Ken Burns-style video: often one large image being panned across and zoomed into - about 60-120 secs in duration. They're 1080x1080 size, 25 fps exporting as mp4.

They normally take about 20 seconds to export. 

As of yesterday, they are now taking outrageously long to export. 8 hours, 4 hours. NO settings have been changed my end, whatsoever in the time that these. I've tried the usual workarounds people suggest: Use Previews, lower bitrate, CUDA etc.

I'm using the latest update of Premiere Pro CC on a 2019 MacBook Pro.

Any help warmly appreciated!

[SAFEHARBOR11 · Accepted solution]

But what are the dimensions (in pixels) of the still images you are working with? If they are very high-resolution like 10,000 x 12,000 pixels or whatever, that can REALLY mess with things

[Philbird]

This may be the issue I guess. I've had a look at a few of the images and they're generally in the region 3000x7000.

Do you think that's what's causing it? Once the images are part of a flattened video they re-export in absolutely no time.

[SAFEHARBOR11]

You have 7000 pixels in the source and only 1080 in output. Unless you are really zooming in tight on a small area, that's a lot of extra unecessary overhead for the system to process. Hop over to Photoshop and downsize the source images some and see if that helps. Maybe cut the size in half at least.

[Philbird]

Thanks so much.