Premiere pro CS5 workflow

[John Gerard]

Hi,
I am exporting a 2 hour project using Media Encoder in CS5. I am exporting the project as Mpeg2-DVD. It is taking a really long time it already took 7+ hours and has 13 hours to go. Is this normal? My projects used to take about 2-4 hours to export until recently. Even in Premiere Pro CS3 recently it was taking a very long time to export. I did create two timelines. Added background sound to video that does not include sound added I think a brightness/contrast and a color correction filter. That's all. I know that if I export in an odd format res that it will take a long time. Even if I add another dual or quad core CPU that does not seem like it would cut the processing down very much. So there has got to be something going wrong here? If this is a true export time for you guys then how do you handle getting your projects out on time. I upgrade my Dell PC so I thought that things would be much better. I am looking at task manager and it does say that the CPU is running at 100% and both processors are being used. I thought that maybe I have Premiere pro/Media Encoder set up incorrectly.

John Gerard

[Mike McCarthy]

It is hard to identify the issue on little information, but I can tell you that I usually export HD timelines to SD DVD at close to realtime performance. I would try exporting a smaller segment (1min) and see how long that takes. You might want to try a segment from the being and one from the end to compare. (Once you have your sequence in AME, you can just duplicate the render item, and adjust the in/out points.) it may just be one section that is cuasing it to be slow, or if it used to be faster, maybe some component in your system is starting to go.

[John Gerard]

Hi,
I will try a smaller segment. What is AME? It might have taken just as long before but it did not seem like it because I did it in three segments.
1) rendered timeline - maybe 1hour I can't completely remember maybe less.
2) export through VrtualDub converting 1440x1080 to 720 x 480, reinterpret, etc. - . 2-4 hours.
3) After creating DVD menus in Encore cs3 I had to transcode to Mpeg-2. Another 2 hours something like that amount.
I usually don't need to use filters brightness, lighting, color correction, etc. I find that even using a brightness or color correction filter really sloooows thinngggs doooown. I didn't realize that even with a CUDA card that does not really help much except in playback during editing the timeline.
The first export I did using Media Encoder CS5 it was going to take about 20 hours to encode straight to Mpeg2-DVD. I did not perform any rendering of the timeline. I have a brightness/contrast filter and a sharpness filter applied. I then started the export over again. The only thing I changed was the field order to Progressive from Lower field first. I am going to only play the video on an HDTV. I know Blu-Ray players can read justvabout any kind of DVD. Now Media Encoder says it will take about 10 hours to complete. A high number but at least it is getting to be inline with what it should be. With out filters applied to the timeline it might take 6-7 hours I will try a test and see. This project is large for me. The ISO file is around 5.5GB. My normal size for videos is normally below 4.7GB in size.
Also, I usually render/export at the highest quality settings and maybe going to a little lower setting would be better without losing much if any quality in the final DVD. Have you tried playing around with this much? Also if you tried this what do you find the quality to be between a one pass export and a 2 pass? Maybe I could save a lot of time there. It is two bad that Premiere Pro can not take advantage of CUDA for the export process. I do find that CUDA helps a lot for rendering on my PC. What I would have had to render before my computer was usable to scrub the timeline blasts through now. This project I recorded onto VCR tape from a still non moving video camera and then imported the footage using a Blackmagic Analog capture card. I usually use my Sony FX-7 HDV camera that records at 1440x1080i footage.
Something screwed up two of my back up drives. When I switched to Windows7. It could have been that Window7 uses a slightly different file system. It still uses the MBR system and a new one for lage drives over 2.2gb. It does not look like it uses the Extended partition type of format anymore which is the way my back up drives are formatted. I have used Media Coder 64bit and I like it but Webroot keeps saying that my search provider in IE is being changed. Every time I start the program. So maybe Media Coder corrupted the drives. I am in the process of using a program called " recovermyfiles". So far I am able to get back at least some of the files.
Media Coder has an option to use CUDA in it's transcoding from DVD to iPad. I wonder how MC is doing this.

John Gerard

[Panagiotis Raris]

John, please post your PC specs and configurations. there are probably a few tricks or tweaks i can help you with.

[Randall Leong]

Originally Posted by John Gerard

Hi,
I am exporting a 2 hour project using Media Encoder in CS5. I am exporting the project as Mpeg2-DVD. It is taking a really long time it already took 7+ hours and has 13 hours to go. Is this normal? My projects used to take about 2-4 hours to export until recently. Even in Premiere Pro CS3 recently it was taking a very long time to export. I did create two timelines. Added background sound to video that does not include sound added I think a brightness/contrast and a color correction filter. That's all. I know that if I export in an odd format res that it will take a long time. Even if I add another dual or quad core CPU that does not seem like it would cut the processing down very much. So there has got to be something going wrong here? If this is a true export time for you guys then how do you handle getting your projects out on time. I upgrade my Dell PC so I thought that things would be much better. I am looking at task manager and it does say that the CPU is running at 100% and both processors are being used. I thought that maybe I have Premiere pro/Media Encoder set up incorrectly.

John Gerard

I think I know the problem:

If Adobe Media Encoder is running without Premiere running in the background, MPE is completely bypassed and the software-only mode takes over. I noticed this on my main system, where using AME (Adobe Media Encoder) alone took more than 3 hours to transcode a 40-minute Cineform HD video file to MPEG-2 SD while directly exporting from Premiere took less than one hour to do the same job.

[John Gerard]

Hi,
The following is the way I am doing it now...
I am exporting my footage to Media Encoder via the Query option so I can stack up more than one project. This is a great feature over CS3. There are quite a few small be very nice improvements in CS5 over CS3. One other is CS5 now recognizes my Sony FX7 camera with no problem very nice. Just having not to deal around some of these little things is a welcome site. Before I had to use HDSplit because of this problem not including that the encoder in CS3 were not very good. There is a lot to learn between the two versions. As a whole I am liking it.
Are you saying that I need to just have premiere Pro powered up or don't use the query option and just export one at a time? I could do this but it would be a bummer. I found that if I unchecked render at maximum bit depth and max quality then things speed up considerably. Going fro 27 hours to 4-10. One project I talked about being 5+GB I was exporting about 3hours of video and I had to fix the length to what it should have been. One video is 1 hour 14minutes and took 4 hours, the 2nd is1.5hours and took about 5 hours, the 3rd took 10 hours and this one is HDV footage and does not have any color correction, etc. It is around 1.5-2hours long.
I found that an encoding setting of 1.5min, 4 target, 7max. Creates great looking video. If I go above 7, I tried 8 once and that ended up with 1 or 2 clutches in the playback. Staying at 7max I never have a problem.

John Gerard

[John Gerard]

Originally Posted by Panagiotis Raris

John, please post your PC specs and configurations. there are probably a few tricks or tweaks i can help you with.

My specs are as follows....
Dell precision 490
RAM DDR2 SDRAM 667mhz 20GB 1GB x 4 and 4GB x 4 chips
Video card Evga GTX 470 non over clocked
FireWire card
Intel motherboard I don't remember the exact specs, chipset etc.
Adapted 1225 eSATA RAID card
On board internal RAID 0 2 drives ( WD Carivar Black 640GB each)
One WD Carivar Black 500 GB system/program drive
One WD carivar Black 500 GB Drive ESATA as scratch and media cache drive. Drives formatted to 4k or maybe 8k cluster size for speed.
2 24" Dell 2407,2408 monitors.
OS- Windows7 64bit retail upgrade Home Premium. Swap drive set to eSATA external media cache drive

Does exporting take advantage of CUDA?
Also, is there a way to specify where Premiere Pro saves the copy of the Premiere Pro project o be used by Media Encoder. I am thinking maybe it should be saved on a drive other than the system drive?

Thanks,
John Gerard

[Adam Gold]

The Dell Precision 490 could be configured with any number of chips, from the achingly slow 5110 (ranked #535 in speed on the Passmark charts) to the still pretty slow (by today's standards) X5355, which, though four times faster, is still not even in the top 100. So the make and model doesn't tell us what chip -- or how many -- you have, which may be having a large effect on your performance.

Edit: Although I found a 2006 configurator page showing nine chips, as outlined above, I've found that there are many more possibilities, ranging from even slower to a little faster. Find out what chip you have and look it up at the following link, then compare it to a Core i7 920 or 930, which is a decent chip for CS5. You'll probably find out why your renders are slow right there.

http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu_list.php

And has been noted before, you're using the wrong version of Win 7 -- you can only access 16 of your 20 gigs of RAM, it appears. So those are two factors, I'm guessing. And you've probably also seem all the other posts about problems with the Caviar Blacks going to sleep which not only impedes performance, but can kill your RAID.

[Randall Leong]

Originally Posted by Adam Gold

The Dell Precision 490 could be configured with any number of chips, from the achingly slow 5110 (ranked #535 in speed on the Passmark charts) to the still pretty slow (by today's standards) X5355, which, though four times faster, is still not even in the top 100. So the make and model doesn't tell us what chip -- or how many -- you have, which may be having a large effect on your performance.

Edit: Although I found a 2006 configurator page showing nine chips, as outlined above, I've found that there are many more possibilities, ranging from even slower to a little faster. Find out what chip you have and look it up at the following link, then compare it to a Core i7 920 or 930, which is a decent chip for CS5. You'll probably find out why your renders are slow right there.

PassMark - CPU Benchmarks - List of Benchmarked CPUs

I did some more investigating, and discovered that the Xeon processors supported by the Dell Precision 490 are Xeon versions of the original Core 2 Duo and Core 2 Quad (65nm) processors. The 5110 is based on the Woodcrest core, the Xeon version of the original Conroe core. The X5355 is of the Clovertown core - the Xeon version of the Kentsfield core. No wonder why CS5 performance is slower than expected. (The 5000-series Xeons are designed for dual-CPU systems.) Plus, the Dell Precision 490 is now already about four years old - and the supported processors are very nearly of the very minimum required performance to run Premiere Pro CS5 at all.

And as Harm Millard pointed out in other threads, raw CPU performance is not a reliable indicator of CS5 performance: When it comes to CS5, performance with respect to the PassMark CPU scores should be compared only within CPU brands and generations, not across them. This means that although the AMD Phenom II x6 1090T BE scored higher than an Intel i7-920 in PassMark, it needed to be overclocked heavily in order to just keep pace with a stock-speed i7-920 or 930 in CS5 simply because all current AMD CPUs lack full support of SSE 4.1. By the same token, an Intel i7 CPU might underperform its AMD counterpart in programs that make full or nearly full use of AMD's extensions and do not make full use of SSE 4.x.

Which goes back to the OP's system: It is not powerful enough to take full advantage of that GTX 470. In fact, it would have performed equally as well with a cheaper GTS 450 or even a GT 430 given the relatively weak CPU.

[John Gerard]

Hi,
No, I dint know that about the Cariver Black drives. I will have to do more research on the issue. I am going to ungrade Windows to start. Right now it is taking 2hours to export 1+ hours of video. At least that amount of time is doable at the moment. 20 hours was not doable. Which version of Windows7 should I upgrade to or is RAM limit the only think to consider. I don't want or need any of the networking option the the other versions of Windows have. It is just something else to disable. That's why I went with Windows Home Premium.

Thanks,

John

[John Gerard]

I just checked and in Advanced power options the HDDs were set to sleep at 20 minutes. Maybe this was the issue. I set everything to always on.

John Gerard

[Randall Leong]

Originally Posted by John Gerard

Hi,
No, I dint know that about the Cariver Black drives. I will have to do more research on the issue. I am going to ungrade Windows to start. Right now it is taking 2hours to export 1+ hours of video. At least that amount of time is doable at the moment. 20 hours was not doable. Which version of Windows7 should I upgrade to or is RAM limit the only think to consider. I don't want or need any of the networking option the the other versions of Windows have. It is just something else to disable. That's why I went with Windows Home Premium.

Thanks,

John

Originally Posted by John Gerard

I just checked and in Advanced power options the HDDs were set to sleep at 20 minutes. Maybe this was the issue. I set everything to always on.

John Gerard

Home Premium can only use up to 16GB of RAM (as I mentioned several times). If you have more than 16GB of RAM, you will have to get those versions of Windows with networking options just to use more than 16GB for anything. As such, the remaining 4GB is completely unusable unless you get a third-party application to use that amount as a "RAM drive".

And the Windows hard drive shutdown optins have no effect on the WD desktop drives. The drives will always spin down even if the Windows hard drive option is set to "Always On". It is set in the drive's firmware (and in this case, it is permanently set and cannot be changed at all).

And your system's slow performance is due to the fact that your system is simply too old. In fact, as I mentioned in my previous post, each of the CPUs in the Precision 490 are (performance-wise) equal only to those of the very first Core 2 Duo and Core 2 Quad CPUs. And two early dual-core Woodcrest (Conroe) Xeons do not perform as well as one single i7 processor.