Speeding up Export

[Peter Rush]

This is a Premiere Pro query really but I know there are a lot of users on here - so Is anyone using the Matrox Max hardware to speed up export (I believe it only works for h.264). I export mainly to MPEG2 for DVD and h.264 for Blu-Ray and archiving but I'd like to know if it lives up to the 5 X Faster claim!

I'm currently taking about 2 hours to export a 1 hour 45 minute wedding in h.264 for blu-ray and about 45 minutes for MPEG2 - I'd like to improve on this for next season. My system is pretty fast already so I'm looking at an add-on rather than a new system.

Pete

[Adrian Tan]

Hi Peter, I'd never heard of that device, but it does look really interesting.

You'd be horrified at my export times. Takes me about a day to process a BluRay (with two passes, and even staying away from the "maximum depth" check box)...

Have you thought, though, about using a two (or more) system workflow? Or do you already do that? Ie have one or more machines that are pretty much dedicated to rendering.

I bought a (by my standards) decent editing laptop last year, and it's been really useful -- not only for throwing things onto to render (or upload/download, or copy from one drive to another), but for same-day and away-from-home edits. Would be about the same price as a Matrox.

[Mark Whittle]

Hi Peter,

Upgrade your graphics card!

I have a MXO2 LE with Max with a 2009 Mac Pro. When I was using Final Cut 7 and Compressor, the Blu-ray H264 exporting was fantastic, doing better than realtime exporting.

Now I'm on Premiere CC, and to take advantage of the accelerated GPU features, I bought a nice Nvidia graphics card. I don't know how much it speeds up H264 but it makes a massive difference with MPEG2 - I exported a 100 minute concert last week in less than 15 minutes. Not really sure how long it took as I went out for 15 minutes and it had finished.

The MAX exporting is great, but - on Mac at least - it won't do accelerated Blu-ray H264 via Adobe Media Encoder. It only does that through Apple Compressor. It will do other flavours of H264, such as YouTube, Vimeo presets. Not sure why that is, but if you're on Windows that won't be a problem.

I use a blu-ray preset in AME for Blu-ray H264 and it exports pretty fast. Plus you can open AME stand alone and import the premiere project sequences you want and have them render out while you work on other stuff.

[Peter Rush]

I have a GeForce GTX 580 with 1.5GB memory which was about £300 and it is a pretty beefy card - upgrading to a Quadro card would cost way more than getting the Matrox MXO2 Max so 'i may look at getting a demo.

I also have a laptop bought specifically for editing in the event my main PC goes down so I could use that for rendering but it would mean copying the footage to the drive in my laptop - another time waster. Premiere Pro, IMO does not like editing from external drives, even USB3.

Pete

[Mark Whittle]

That GTX card is good. Don't know that a Quadro would improve on that noticeably. I think mine's the same and it made a huge difference. Are you running CC, do you have Cuda installed and do you have Mercury Transmit on? Sorry if they're all a bit obvious...
My lappy edits off a usb drive quite happily but I haven't taxed it too heavily. I keep the cache & scratch files on the usb drive too.

Cheers

[Peter Rush]

Mark I didn't need to install CUDA separately - I get an render option in the project settings for 'Mercury Playback Engine GPU Acceleration' which is selected - am I missing something?

When I've tried to edit from an external drive (meeting the required 7200 rpm) I get jittery playback when using 3 or more video tracks so that's no good for me.

Pete

[Adrian Tan]

Been doing a little more research on this Matrox device. Some quick thoughts:

-- Found it difficult to find information about comparable products. Anyone know of any other decent hardware encoders?
-- YouTube reviews seem to demonstrate encoding speeds around 1/2 to 3/4 real time. No idea, though, of what specs were used for rendering, and what the final quality is like. Anyway, it's clearly a potentially huge productivity improvement -- thanks to Peter for posting about it. I hate it when you render something, see a mistake, and need to re-render. Also useful in time-crunch situations, like same-day edits.
-- Don't know if it's going to be a huge productivity improvement for Peter; his times already seem amazingly fast.
-- I think my system is very slow. My fastest machine easily takes 5-10 times the length of a video to render it (partly depending, I think, on how many effects are used; sharpening and noise reduction seem to be particular killers). From this point of view, I wonder how system specs affect Matrox rendering time. If you have a slow system, can it still encode faster than real time?
-- B&H seem to be the cheapest, selling Matrox Mini with Max for US$549 (compared with AU$871, the cheapest price in Australia). In the scheme of things, I've wasted a lot more money on a lot of dumber purchases.
-- Was surprised to find how long it's been around. Watched some YouTube reviews where they were advertising a version 2 of the encoder at NAB 2010. Makes me also wonder about how long h264 is going to remain a standard -- when is h265 going to come in? Apparently, iPhone 6 supports h265. I suppose, at any rate, h264 is going to be around long enough for the encoder to be useful if you purchase it now.

[Peter Rush]

Adrian, when looking at my render times I have usually 3 or 4 video tracks and 2 or 3 audio tracks. I use sharpening a lot and Premiere's inbuilt colour corrector and rarely do I use effects. If I use neat video for noise reduction (a last resort) you can multiply those render times by 4!!!

Pete

[Noa Put]

While I do use edius to render my h.264 mp4 files out to put on a usb disc (and which uses the onboard gpu to accelerate rendering where 1 hour of avchd 28mbs without effects takes about 17 minutes) I do use tmpgenc authoring works to make my blu-ray dvd's, I import a hqavi file that's exported from edius and have a winfast pxvc100 spursengine card that works together with tmpgenc, it's been a while since I made a Blu-ray but I thought 1 hour of footage takes about 40 minutes to render to a blu-ray format.

[Adrian Tan]

Desperately trying to finish up an edit today and get to post office in time (while meanwhile procrastinating on this board). The thought of the rendering time depresses me.

Going to go visit B&H to get myself a Christmas present, though Lord knows I can't afford it. Can let you know in a week or two how the new toy works out on my old computer and how it plays with Premiere Pro.

Peter, thanks for bringing this topic up.

Edit: By the way, I really haven't found much in the way of competitor products -- mainly stuff that converts a video from one format to another rather than encodes from scratch -- but this article might be worth a read: http://techreport.com/review/23324/a...ding-on-the-pc

[Adrian Tan]

Haven't done any systematic testing, but wanted to give an initial impression...

Sample comparison so far: 18-minute video, took me around 3 hours 20 minutes to render with two-pass encode using X264 PRO codec. On Matrox Mini, predicted time is about 1 hour 45 minutes. And since the Matrox render is just one pass (I think; I'm not sure there's the option of two), I'm not 100% sure I've saved any time at all!

I have a slow system, though, and, what's more, I'm editing off and rendering onto an external hard drive with USB2, so I assume that's going to severely hamper the speed.

[Note Suwanchote]

this might be beneficial
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