I have had a quad core and CS3 for almost a year and the increase in rendering speed has been great when using the Adobe media encoder. All 4 cores are always cranking and cutting render times compared to my work dual core almost in half.

Tonight, I loaded up an HD project that is in Canon 24f and I am converting it to 16x9 SD DVD mpg at 8mbps. It is only 10 minutes long and is taking 25+ minutes to render, and when I look at the processors it is only using 25%! What is up all of a sudden?

2 things that might have changed since I last noticed all 4 cores getting utilized.

Adobe pushed out a Premiere update adding Sony Xdcam EX support (3.0.2??)

Microsoft pushed out SP3.

Is possible one of these has caused issues with threading across 4 cores? Heck.....at 25% I am really only using 1 core. This stinks if I have somehow lost the benefits of quad processing.

Thanks.

I may have stumbled onto something. When I create a new project using the Adobe HDV-1080-24p preset and import the same clips into my timeline, I get amazing render speeds! The thing cooks and rendered 1 minute of the timeline to an mpg in about 20 seconds or so. At that rate the entire 10 minutes would render in 3.5 minutes vs. 25 minutes in the original project. I had downloaded the Adobe presets for Canon HDV 24f that were designed for PPRO2, but they worked great before. Now it seems they may be problematic in CS# with the latest updates form Adobe which included a new preset to take the place of the PPRO2 canon presets.

I will post if I see anything else interesting here.

Do you have all the recent updates from Adobe?

I feel like I am talking to myself but here is another bit of useful information. The issue is caused by "de-interlacing" being checked in the output box of Adobe Media Encoder. This is tunred on by default and it somehow causes your render to be single core threaded.

Weird? I had noticed this glitch in CS3 where most of the mpg presets have deinterlace checked by default which essentially halves your resolution when outputting to Blu-ray....but I never noticed this issue with only using a single core.

Good LUck....hopefully I Will spare some of you running into these issues.

Out!

Wow, so the de-interlacing is single-core aware? That seems like a bit of a problem on their end!

Thanks for the info, I have a Q6600 and I've noticed the media encoder is pretty slow here when I've used it recently, and CPU usage hovers between 24 and 26%. I'll try unchecking that box, since all my footage is progressive, with rare exceptions.

Thanks!
Eric

eric,

Any luck verifying this? Just because I found it on mine doesn't mean it happens to every prmiere cs3 install.

Thanks

Marty, thanks for your comments and suggestions...i'm afraid i have nothing to contribute to this, but am about to make a jump to quad core (from dual) so all of this input is helpful.

also, how much would you say having one aids the actual editing of HD...i.e. HD clips start to stutter when I run 2 or 3 effects...how about with a quad core?

I really cant comment. I have been running 2 Dual core opterons now for 3 years...

I don't have this problem when deinterlacing on my quad core. I do, however, only have one core used when I'm doing noise reduction through adobe media encoder (I wish they'd just implement it as a plug-in for finer control).

Make sure we are talking about the same deinterlacing control here. I am not referring to the one that you acces from the timeline and apply to individual clips. I am referring to an option in the Adobe Media Encoder itself that is on the "output" screen. For some reason when I choose a 24P HDV template to work from, this check box is on by default and is on a screen that is behind the source screen. Why would I want to deinterlace 24P to output anyway? Regardless, if I miss this (which I have done many times accidentally) my renders to mpg2 HD are 3 to 5 times longer to output and the resulting file is lower res as a result. Also only one core seems to carry the load explaining the excessive render times.

If I uncheck this option then I see all 4 cores jump in, virtually 100% usage and the render is done in record time.

So please make sure when testing this that you are using the deinterlace option in Adobe Media Encoder....not deinterlace on the timeline.

Peace.

You could always export an uncompressed movie (File>Export>Movie) then use windows media encoder to compress it. That program will use up all of your cores :).

If I don't choose deinterlace then all of my cores are in use anyway! Remember in my case, de-interlace was checked by accident (or as a default that I didn't want anyway).

Also, exporting uncompressed 1080P HD footage is a pain because of the excessive storage for me.

Peace.


You could always export an uncompressed movie (File>Export>Movie) then use windows media encoder to compress it. That program will use up all of your cores :).