Fast export of previews from Premiere. Where?

[Thomas Koba]

My 30 min sequence takes about 20 hours to export from Premiere to a H264 at 1080P. I have not checked Best Quality on export settings..

I want to export a preiew file for my client. My premiere can playback at quarter resolution realtime. Is there any way, that I can export at that 1/4 quality, and get an export in 30 mins. or so? I cannot find any settings for this.

 

[Stefan Scherperel]

20 hrs from a 30 min timeline is pretty long. What are your sequence settings? Are you working from a 4K timeline or a 1080P Timeline.
If you are working from a 4K timeline try the following.
Create a new sequence using the 1080P RED Preset that matches your frame rate.
Select your whole timeline and copy, then paste in the 1080P Timeline.
Select all of the footage and click (Scale to frame size - this is important for a fast export)
Now you should be able to export your timeline to 1080P or 720P very quickly.
If your footage is on a 1080P timeline allready, make sure that scale to frame size is checked on your red footage.

 

[Chris McKechnie]

20 hrs from a 30 min timeline is pretty long. What are your sequence settings? Are you working from a 4K timeline or a 1080P Timeline.
If you are working from a 4K timeline try the following.
Create a new sequence using the 1080P RED Preset that matches your frame rate.
Select your whole timeline and copy, then paste in the 1080P Timeline.
Select all of the footage and click (Scale to frame size - this is important for a fast export)
Now you should be able to export your timeline to 1080P or 720P very quickly.
If your footage is on a 1080P timeline allready, make sure that scale to frame size is checked on your red footage.

The downside to "scale to frame size" is there is a noticeable quality difference on export. But if it's not your final deliverable and only for review, that works.

My suggestion would be to edit in native 4/5k, do a master 4/5k export, then use a program like AME, or handbrake to transcode that 1080 file.

 

[Thomas Koba]

I have done, what you describe. Making a 1080P timeline, and inserting an edited 4K sequence. I just manually scaled the sequence to 50%, to make it fit. Is the same as "Scale to frame size", or is the manual resizing causing my slow render?

(Cant check right now, as I´m rendering)

 

[Gareth Ng]

You could try lowering the bit rate, using VBR instead of CBR and exporting at 720p.

 

[Stefan Scherperel]

Chris, I have actually done quite a few tests exporting from Premiere, and have even posted them here. As far as I could tell, there was no discernible difference in render quality from the following at 1080P
Scale to frame size checked on
Manual rescale - scale to frame size checked off
Use maximum render quality on and off.
Thomas, by scaling the clips this is what is causing your long render times, guaranteed. I can also say having done hundreds of red projects using premiere that you do not gain quality by unchecking scale to frame size (UNLESS) you are scaling the clip greater than the frame size cropping the image.
I would take all your clips, click scale to frame size and make sure they are then set at 100%. You should find your render to move 4 to 5x faster.

 

[Mike Harrington]

I think from my tests Stephan is right in this....

The bad scaling comes from doing 'scale to frame size' and then scaling it again.....I don't PPro is smart enough to concatenate the 2 scaling operations so you are introducing some loss of quality. If you plan to reframe a 1080 sequence with 4k material....then don't use scale to frame size, but if you just want to go 4k to 1080, then it's fine