Premiere CS6's "Export Media" is one lazy bugger.

[Petri Teittinen]

So I've been testing Premiere Pro CS6 quite a bit recently, thanks to its unwillingness to use RED Rocket. While testing I noticed Premiere's "Export Media" feature is slow as molasses.

I mentioned in another thread I have installed some desktop monitoring gadgets to see what the CPU and GPUs are doing. While keeping a close eye on those, I ran an Export Media job (high fps 3K/4K/5K footage to NTSC DVD MPEG2, with maximum render depth and max render quality both disabled) and discovered why it takes my rather fast PC 35 minutes to export a 2-minute project: CPU is hardly used at all during Export and GPUs do nothing.

CPU usage pattern is especially telling: it stays practically idle for 80% of the time. Once every 5 seconds CPU use jumps to 15-20%, only to drop back down to idle right away. And according to monitoring gadgets, neither GPU is used at all: they remain at 0% all through the export.

Is your Export behaving the same way? How do you make Exports out of Premiere?

 

[Oliver Peters]

I would offer that you are debayering RED footage in the export and also encoding to a long GOP format. I'm not sure about CPU usage, but there is no way this process will be fast. If you generated uncompressed downsampled files in RCXP first and edited with these. Then generated an uncompressed master before creating the MPEG2 - you would see a world of difference in speed and performance.

Oliver

 

[Brian Merlen]

Well part of the whole point of using CS6 is the native editing ability, so I wouldn't fault him for cutting the files natively, that is the whole premiere incentive. The real question is why is a 64 bit application not using all the cores/ram at once during the export...

 

[Stephen Gentle]

That doesn't sound very good - when I have some time I'll see if mine does the same thing.

What is your storage doing though? It may be that the system is constantly waiting for IO (either just reading the source files, or possibly swapping memory if you don't have much RAM) in-between compressing frames...

 

[Petri Teittinen]

That doesn't sound very good - when I have some time I'll see if mine does the same thing.

Much appreciated, Stephen.

What is your storage doing though? It may be that the system is constantly waiting for IO (either just reading the source files, or possibly swapping memory if you don't have much RAM) in-between compressing frames...

32GB of RAM and storage is a 512GB SSD on a SATA6.0 channel with a read/write of approx. 300MB/sec. I don't think storage or RAM is the issue here.

 

[Olivier Madar]

On my mac Pro 2009, I had a big trouble during rendering with CS55. The rendering process began fast, then get slower and slower and only 1 core was left used. I was going crazy with this until i understood that the heat of the cores was the cause : Premiere use all the power of the cores and the temp increase in 5 to 10 minutes (i use a soft to monitor the temperature of the core). When a certain limit has reached, my computer stop using all the core. The problem is that the power don't come back until the next reboot. I changed the fan speed on the core to the maximum when i do rendering. Now, i have not this problem anymore. May be this can help.

Olivier

 

[Petri Teittinen]

The rendering process began fast, then get slower and slower and only 1 core was left used. I was going crazy with this until i understood that the heat of the cores was the cause

My water-cooled system is nowhere near overheating. And whenever Premier's Export uses the CPU, all cores show activity. Thanks for taking the time to reply, regardless!

 

[Oliver Peters]

Well part of the whole point of using CS6 is the native editing ability, so I wouldn't fault him for cutting the files natively, that is the whole premiere incentive. The real question is why is a 64 bit application not using all the cores/ram at once during the export...

I'm not faulting him for cutting native. I personally think it's false economy, especially if he has a Red Rocket that would transcode to an edit friendly format much faster ahead of time. But I agree that's part of the appeal of Premiere. 35 min. for a 2 min. piece isn't unreasonable and you'll see all sorts of posts around here with similar results. In fact, most are significantly slower. There is no free lunch. You can pay the "render tax" at the front end or the back end. Premiere puts it at the back. Should it export faster? Sure. Will it? Doubtful unless Adobe finds a way to integrate Red Rocket into the render.

- Oliver

 

[Olivier Madar]

I'm not faulting him for cutting native. I personally think it's false economy, especially if he has a Red Rocket that would transcode to an edit friendly format much faster ahead of time. But I agree that's part of the appeal of Premiere. 35 min. for a 2 min. piece isn't unreasonable and you'll see all sorts of posts around here with similar results. In fact, most are significantly slower. There is no free lunch. You can pay the "render tax" at the front end or the back end. Premiere puts it at the back. Should it export faster? Sure. Will it? Doubtful unless Adobe finds a way to integrate Red Rocket into the render.

- Oliver

Oliver, I usually render 1080p from quadHD timeline on my notebook at 1,5x the real time without the red rocket (and without checking full quality render box either). Here, on a high end computer, you can't accept 16x the time for rendering. There is something wrong.

Olivier

 

[Chris McKechnie]

Slow render export times for me as well even with the rocket. Diasppointed in Premier in that regard.

 

[Wes Howell]

Hi,

How are you exporting?

Are you doing a direct export from Premiere? Or are you cueing the job through AME? (Adobe Media Encoder)

There definitely does appear to be something wrong. Here are a few things to check.

With Direct Export, your GPU and the RED Rocket should both be doing most of the heavy lifting. I see 5% CPU usage in this scenario when downscaling from 5k HD, the GPU helps a LOT. The Rocket frees up CPU cycles because it's doing all the decoding.

If you're cueing through AME, there is a chance that it can't access the Rocket if PR is still open. When I cue through AME, I always close PR first so that AME will have access to the Rocket card.

As I've mentioned before, I think that the issues here could be related to you using multiple GPUs.

Wes

 

[David Collard]

Dumb point, but I recall a specific plugin for Red and premiere 5.5. Maybe a plugin is missing.

 

[Petri Teittinen]

Are you doing a direct export from Premiere?

Hi Wes. I'm doing a direct export from Premiere. Haven't even tried AME yet.

There definitely does appear to be something wrong. Here are a few things to check.
With Direct Export, your GPU and the RED Rocket should both be doing most of the heavy lifting. I see 5% CPU usage in this scenario when downscaling from 5k HD, the GPU helps a LOT. The Rocket frees up CPU cycles because it's doing all the decoding.

The GPUs are not used during export at all. I can't tell if RR is used or not.

I'm pretty sure this exporting issue is somehow related to other issues Premiere is having with RED Rocket. Not sure if you saw my post in the other thread, but I realized that in my system, Premiere uses RR only when playback resolution is set to Full.

 

[Petri Teittinen]

As I've mentioned before, I think that the issues here could be related to you using multiple GPUs.

Wes, my 460/580/RED Rocket setup runs very nicely on DaVinci Resolve 8 & 9. The issue is not with the hardware; this is software related. Please see my latest update on the issues I'm experiencing with Premiere.

 

[Johnny Friday]

Petri,
for what it is worth: I got tired of trying to render out of premier....BEST way i found is via AME---this dramatically improved things. WHY? don't know, but was the ONLY way i could get a render....I did an hour doc with heavy on effects and R3d with some mixed codecs and 22hours of rendering via AME....but out of premier direct just would not go at all....after 24 hours i gave up and went AME route. I'm using a Quadro 4000 card; RR card in an 8core with 32gb ram. Was really not impressed with the render times...So bad, i see beyond the positives of RAW editing and transcoding to prores 4444 from RCX as a better workflow....

 

[Wes Howell]

Hi Petri,

Direct export should work.

I tested the Rocket on my Mac just now and it works fine regardless of what the resolution is set to. I'll plan to test this on my PC but I expect to see the same results.

Genuinely sorry that you're having issues - they are not common. It might be worth reducing / pulling out your additional grpahics cards just to verify that the issue still occurs. (if it's not too much hassle) There is also a chance that this might be a RED Rocket firmware / software issue. I am using firmware from a couple months ago on my Rocket without issues. FWIW, 3rd party effects can definitely contribute to slower render times.

Wes

 

[Petri Teittinen]

Johnny, I'm fairly certain I could achieve much faster rendering times by using AME. But going that route would defeat the entire point of Premiere's support for native RED format. I don't wish to do that one extra step of exporting from Premiere into something I can feed into AME. To me that feels totally pointless and a waste.

The thing is, I'm absolutely positive the poor performance of Premiere direct export is nothing but a piece of buggy/poor code somewhere... and once Adobe finds and fixes it, we're all going to see superbly fast direct exporting which uses both RR and GPUs to their fullest. And that would be another big step towards Premiere reaching its full potential.

 

[Chris McKechnie]

Johnny, I'm fairly certain I could achieve much faster rendering times by using AME. But going that route would defeat the entire point of Premiere's support for native RED format. I don't wish to do that one extra step of exporting from Premiere into something I can feed into AME. To me that feels totally pointless and a waste.

The thing is, I'm absolutely positive the poor performance of Premiere direct export is nothing but a piece of buggy/poor code somewhere... and once Adobe finds and fixes it, we're all going to see superbly fast direct exporting which uses both RR and GPUs to their fullest. And that would be another big step towards Premiere reaching its full potential.

Totally agree. I went with premier because of native support and fast export times....the later doesn't exist.

 

[Petri Teittinen]

Direct export should work.

No disagreement from me

I tested the Rocket on my Mac just now and it works fine regardless of what the resolution is set to. I'll plan to test this on my PC but I expect to see the same results.

If you're serious about it, replicate my setup and see what happens. Install two Nvidia GPUs, a RED Rocket and first install Premiere 6.0, then update it to 6.0.1. On Windows 7 64-bit Ultimate, not on Mac.

It might be worth reducing / pulling out your additional grpahics cards just to verify that the issue still occurs. (if it's not too much hassle)

That's just the point, isn't it? It is a hassle -- especially if I'm supposed to run Premiere with a single GPU and DaVinci Resolve with two. And Wes, let's not forget Premiere runs on my two GPUs + RR quite nicely when I set playback resolution to Full. Sure, it chokes on 5K content but 4K and below play pretttty well.

There is also a chance that this might be a RED Rocket firmware / software issue. I am using firmware from a couple months ago on my Rocket without issues. FWIW, 3rd party effects can definitely contribute to slower render times.

Firmware on my RR is v1.1.16.5 which has been out for ages. The driver version is 1.4.27. Rolling back to 1.4.19 made no difference. I'm not using 3rd party effects; those will have to wait until all this 2 GPUs + RR debugging is done with.

 

[Petri Teittinen]

There's been some progress. You might also want to read Wes' post earlier in that thread about RED Rocket and 16x9 formats.