Optimizing CS4 Adobe Media Encoder for performance

[Renat Zarbailov]

Hello gang,

I have been noticing amazing speeds when converting numerous Premiere CS4 timelines via Adobe Media Encoder. It seems that AME (Adobe Media Encoder) shines best when used in a separate AVI to H.264 conversion rather than transfer from Premiere timeline.

18:37-minute Standard Def. AVI file (720X480, 29.97fps) dropped into AME to be converted to SD H.264 MP4 (720X480, 24P, 3mbps, 320kbps audio) utilizes 96% of the CPU power with memory usage hovering around 1.28GB. And do you know how long it took to convert? Only 14 short minutes! I must mention that in the task manager I have set the "priority" level on AME to "realtime", PProHeadless to "realtime", Premiere to "high", and ImporterProcessServer to "high".

8:41-minute SD AVI (720X480, 29.97fps) from Premiere timeline to SD H.264 MP4 (720X480, 24P, 3mbps, 320kbps audio) utilized only 31% of the CPU power with memory usage hovering around 1.1GB, taking almost 18 minutes to convert.

As you can see there's some CPU/memory leak when transferring footage from the Premiere timeline compared to the lean performance of stand-alone AVI drop into AME to convert to H.264 format.

The most CPU-hungry beast in the task manager was PProHeadless.exe, reaching up to 89% of CPU utilization, albeit the memory usage, maxing out to 530mb.

I am using a PC running on WinXP Pro x64, consisting of quad-core Q6600 @2.4GHZ, 8GB Corsair DDR2 RAM, 150GB WD Raptor as C:, 1TB Samsung HD103UJ where all video/Premiere project file(s) were stored, 300GB Seagate Barracuda as a scratch disk, there are other drives attached that were not used for this review.

I welcome you comments and suggestions related to better optimizing Premiere CS4 and AME (Adobe Media Encoder) performance.