Making my PC export and render faster

[Nejc Slatner]

I have a PC :

- i7 - 4770 3.5 ghz
- 32GB ram
- GeForce GTX 660
- 64 bit Win 7
- Samsung SSD 840 265GB

I use Premiere Pro CC 2015 and I export to ProRes HQ with Miraizon ProRes codec

What should I upgrade to have faster export and render in Premiere?


I just bought, but not installed yet Synology DS416 with 2x HGST NAS 4TB 7200 SATA 3 64MB drives where I will have my RAW files. I would also like to export to this drive. I need a faster switch to connect PC and Synology over the LAN. Which one?



Thanks!

 

[Milano Questa]

I would upgrade to:
- Intel Core i7-5820K
- 64GB Ram
- GTX 980 or Titan

 

[Eric Bowen]

You would need 10Gbe for faster network bandwidth. That would require 10Gbe adapters in the system and on the Synology NAS. You would also have to have a 10Gbe switch if you want any other connection such as to your internet. The Quad cores when clocked to over 4GHz make solid render systems for Premiere/AME due to the higher clock speed with GPU acceleration. However you you want better render times than those you would need a 6 core or 8 core on an X99 system clocked to 3.9GHz plus. I would also suggest rendering to a local drive such as an SSD and just copy/move the media to the backup.

 

[Simon Dunne]

I thought that ProRes on windows was only 32bit? Did Miraizon managed to get a 64bit version working? If you look in task manager, you'll see that when premiere is running, there's always a QT32 bit program running. What do your graphs tell you in task manager?

 

[Stephen Lovett]

You would need 10Gbe for faster network bandwidth. That would require 10Gbe adapters in the system and on the Synology NAS. You would also have to have a 10Gbe switch if you want any other connection such as to your internet. The Quad cores when clocked to over 4GHz make solid render systems for Premiere/AME due to the higher clock speed with GPU acceleration. However you you want better render times than those you would need a 6 core or 8 core on an X99 system clocked to 3.9GHz plus. I would also suggest rendering to a local drive such as an SSD and just copy/move the media to the backup.

Hi Eric,

Would you mind mind clarifying something for me please. Overall your advice is solid and rendering to a fast local drive and then copying to the NAS makes sense, but the whole 10 gig thing makes no sense to me. The Synology NAS just isn't fast enough to take advantage of the additional bandwidth. I have the larger 8 bay unit for archival and writing to it is about ~ 110 MBs, and it also lacks a 10 gig port and is not expandable, so I don't see where spending all that money to get to 10 gig helps him out.

Totally agree on the rest of the stuff.

Am I missing something?

Thanks,

Steve

 

[Nejc Slatner]

Yes, there is Adobe QT32 Server.exe. In the last few days I have about 100 + clips on a timeline and have a "problem" with PProHeadless.exe. It is opened quite a few times and uses a lot of RAM.

This is going on right now when I have about 60 30s clips in the export queue in running Media Encoder

 

[Eric Bowen]

Hi Eric,

Would you mind mind clarifying something for me please. Overall your advice is solid and rendering to a fast local drive and then copying to the NAS makes sense, but the whole 10 gig thing makes no sense to me. The Synology NAS just isn't fast enough to take advantage of the additional bandwidth. I have the larger 8 bay unit for archival and writing to it is about ~ 110 MBs, and it also lacks a 10 gig port and is not expandable, so I don't see where spending all that money to get to 10 gig helps him out.

Totally agree on the rest of the stuff.

Am I missing something?

Thanks,

Steve

I was not stating that particular Synology did have 10gbe expansion card options or not. I was simply stating it would have to for any greater network bandwidth. Any NAS based unit will not get near the performance of a File server because they use very low end hardware on the all in 1 network storage units often with software raid. This significantly lowers the performance for both the network offload and storage requests. NAS units are solid for archive ie an intermediate archive. Beyond that the performance is really to limited to work direct from except in specific limited cases such as 2 editors with standard bit rate media.

 

[M.Halsell]

Low Hanging Fruit

Low Hanging Fruit

More specifically, just a bit more information about the workflow: What is the volume of footage being trans coded? Is the trans coding for editing or delivery? or What is the source -> transcoded format? Prores flavor/quality setting? Heavy timeline effects? HD or 4K+ timelines? Have you/ or able to benchmark against another machine to see rendering speed is a specific or localized phenomena? What is the general RAM/CPU utilization under load?

Is there adequate scratch disk space, updated GPUdrivers, PP memory optimizations?

Your hardware seems current enough. If the rendering or transcoding is consuming hours per day on the workstation, perhaps a secondary machine can reduce the load, although it would be a bit more cumbersome to move all that data around.

 

[Simon Dunne]

Yes, there is Adobe QT32 Server.exe. In the last few days I have about 100 + clips on a timeline and have a "problem" with PProHeadless.exe. It is opened quite a few times and uses a lot of RAM.

This is going on right now when I have about 60 30s clips in the export queue in running Media Encoder

So, in a system with 32gb or ram, you're running at just over 50%, on the CPU cores (remembering GPU can be a big help when rendering), you're running at 50% too. If you open the system resources monitor, you can also see disk speed too etc. There's no issue with PPro Headless, that's normal behavior. I think the issue lies with the fact you're writing QT files. 32bit programs can only utilise 3gb of ram. So that's your speed issue. To test this, export the same render queue, but as DNxHD and see what the difference is like. Personally, i never use any MOV files. They just cause trouble along the way.

 

[Nejc Slatner]

To start from the beginning if it helps

I shoot on RED, DJI Inspire (4K MOV/H264) and GoPro (4K/ HD 120fps). I have to deliver ProRes HQ 4K files at the end. Apple or Miraizon. And I don´t own a Mac.

Most of the time I only apply Colorista III and sharpness to the clips.


On a current MacBook PRO there is a slightly faster export of the same files.

So If we start from the beginning, what can I do with my PC to make it export faster, if it is possible due to the 32bit issue as Simon wrote? And what is the best work flow, where to keep the files and where to export them?

I forgot to mention that I also have RAID with 3x2TB drives inside the machine where I used to have the files before NAS.

Thank you very much for the help!

 

[Eric Bowen]

The software itself can limit the performance of exporting especially if it does not have GPU acceleration support for frame properties. Quicktime on windows is 32bit unless they implement a special SDK like Adobe supposedly did back with the launch of CC. Supposedly the Quicktime player support in Premiere is 64bit. The performance with Quicktime on export with Adobe is better than other editing applications but still limited compared to exporting files that are not MOV. So the only real way to increase performance outside of the suggestion above to move to a non Quicktime based format such as MXF is raw processing power such as more cores and threads at similar or higher clock frequency ie a 6 or 8 core CPU at 3.9GHz and higher.

 

[Nejc Slatner]

So could Mac handle my type of export files better?

 

[Eric Bowen]

The software would handle it better simply because of the 64bit option for Quicktime. The hardware would not though. You would be better off moving to X99 or waiting on Apple to update their lineup.