How to decrease export time
 

This is more of a general computer question, but I use Premiere CS3.

What pieces of hardware result in fast export times? This is a general problem I'm having, which I am more than willing to spend some money on to remedy. For after effects, I know more RAM is supposed to help, but specifically what goes into the export process and what are the best ways of increasing the speed?

You can get a Matrox card for faster-than-realtime MPEG2 exports, there are also expensive video cards like the Quadro FX that will improve H.264 export times. Overclocking will give you the best bang-for-your buck on most CPU intensive exports (so long as you don't fry your computer in the process). RAM upgrade probably won't give you much of a boost, but could help with stability issues, or if multiple programs are running (CS3/AfterEffects, etc).

Be more specific in your requirements and you'll get more tailored suggestions.

Skip Matrox, their RTX2 is more trouble than it's worth.

In sequence of importance:

1. CPU
2. CPU
3. RAM
4. Disk setup
5. GPU if at all.

Matrox generally is a show stopper.

RAM impacts the export time more than the Disk setup?

I just spoke with a computer scientist who claimed that the most important element would be the disk setup, namely the write speed of the hard drive and whether there is a RAID config, etc.

Does Premiere use RAM at all for exporting?

How does the CPU affect exporting?

Encoding to any format is CPU intensive. A lot of calculations going on, getting data from memory, applying the encoding algorithm, writing the results back to memory and then from memory in big chunks write back to disk.

A simple test to discern where your system may have bottlenecks:

If CPU usage during encoding is over 90%, that is where the bottleneck lies, if it is around 60% or below, then your disk setup is where the bottleneck is. Anywhere in between, both the CPU and disk setup could be improved.

I just checked CPU usage during an export to H.264 and it was consistently above 90%. It actually was frequently at 98-100%. Not good. I have an Intel Core 2 Duo E4500. I'll have to look into this.

What do you mean, not good. CPUs are there to be utilized :) 100 percent CPU utilization during rendering is ideal, anything less would indicate a problem.

When exporting, CPU is critical, RAM and drives not so much. RAM and disk speeds are important when actually editing, not so much at export time (RAM and drives are easily able to deliver necessary data way faster than CPU computes them).

...

Jiri, my export times are too long. That is my main problem. If what Harm said is accurate, then if the CPU usage during export is above 90% (and in my case close to 100%), then a more powerful CPU should increase export speed. You also said that CPU is critical, so while getting a close-to-100% CPU usage during export may indicate that the CPU is working to its full potential, since I am not happy with the resulting speed, I assume that that is where my problem is.

Keep in mind that H.264 is the most taxing format to export to. If you use that a lot, it may be time to look at the ridiculously expensive nVidia Quadro CX card ($ 1700) which is supposed to help that encoding process significantly.

Do the same check when encoding to MPEG2. It you CPU usage still hovers around the same figures, your disk setup is not a bottleneck, but you would profit from a faster CPU.

A lot of people use AVCHD nowadays but find that their PC is not up to this daunting task. Material like that would require as a bare minimum (IMO) an i7 overclocked to 3.6 GHz, but better a dual Xeon W5580/5590.