suggestions to improve rendering time...?
 

Hi, I use two different PC's to edit, both are relatively good spec (approx 2.5ghz processor, gig of ram, 300gb HD) however rendering is still painfully slow. For example 2 mins to render a simple 3 second rubber band fade out. I once used a feature called 'render from ram' and that was quite helpful but cannot find it now in my premiere 6.5.
If anyone has any suggestions (and I'm sure you clever people will) about what I can do in premiere or even in the bios of my pc to speed this render process up I would be eternally greatful!
David

When you say render what exactly do you mean? Are you rendering out to a
file? If so, what format / codec? For example, if you render out to DVD (MPEG-2)
the encoding to that format is very expensive (time wise), but has nothing todo
with that rubberband or any other effects.

However, besides that the only other things you can do is upgrade your
computers (dual core 4 GHz should be a lot faster), switch to another editing
package (like Vegas, which should be faster) and might even support network
rendering (like Vegas) for the EFFECTS (not DVD / MPEG-2 encoding).

Or you might get a hardware accelerator card to help along with the effects
encoding. All of these things (except upgrade to a faster computer) help only
with things like effects rendering. Doesn't really help with DVD / MPEG-2 encoding,
for example.

i'm not too bothered about the exporting time that you refer to, thats bareable. I very rarely use effects (as in transitions) that you drag and drop in premiere, I only use fade in/out using the rubber band effect. To be able to view the fade I need to hit enter to render. Thats what seems painfully slow. I use a PC not a MAC but hope to change that soon. During my degree we edited on much lower spec pc's and the rendering times were 10 times quicker, I just don't know what I'm missing.
I have very good graphics cards in both pcs, is this accelerator card you mention seperate to the graphics card?
Thanks a lot.
David

Check out the Matrox RTX.100 Extreme real time editing card for Premiere Pro I have had it for over a year and I love it. 51 TV shows later I stand by it. Go to www.matrox.com

No, those things are seperate cards. See the post above this one. However,
it sounds like something else must be wrong if that is an action that shouldn't
take that long. Unfortunately I'm not on Premiere so I cannot tell you how
long a similar action takes on my system.

Do you have any anti-virus / spam / spyware software running? If so, try
disabling that when you do video work. That's all I can think of for the
moment, sorry.

There are a host of little things to chase down and smother in order to wrest a few more clock cycles out of the CPU. You didn't mention whether you have one or two HDs in your machines. You definitely want a dedicated A/V HD for your capture and scratch disk, and make sure it's on the other IDE channel. Do NOT use the system drive, or share the A/V drive on the same channel as the DVD recorder.

Little things to tweak:

Turn off autoplay on the DVD drive.
Turn off the clock in the system tray. Seriously, it steals cycles to keep updated. Get a desk clock.
Turn off drive and folder sharing on your A/V drive at the very least.
Disable the drive "indexing service" used by Windoze to catalog everything on the drive for faster searches.
Remove all superfluous software. If it ain't for your video work, chuck it.
Make sure no programs, like anti-virus are running in the background.
Run regedit, search down into the registry for HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run and check out what's firing up every time you start Windows. Do you really need all of those programs? Probably not. Delete the key values that are unneeded.
Also check Start Menu -> programs -> startup, though few software installers put stuff there where you can find it.
Check the Task Scheduler. Anything there? Dump it.
Turn off the screensaver.
Update everything, starting with Windows Update, and working through all your hardware and software. Hint: create a directory on your system disk for updates, with subfolders for each program and device. Download update files to these. Helps to keep track of things. Don't forget the motherboard BIOS and whatnot.
Defrag your drives.

Finally, you have 1GB of RAM. Not bad, not bad. Not good, but not bad. More memory will do more to improve performance than processor power alone. It's also a lot cheaper. Go for 2GB, if you can.

You want a lean, mean processing machine, only without George Foreman peering over your shoulder...

ok thanks guys thats very helpful. So would you say its best to capture onto/edit from a different hard disk to that that premiere is installed on? or to keep it all on the same drive? Couldn't tell you how the drives are connected just yet as I havent seen the PC recently.
thanks

i've now decided to buy another lower spec PC to use for the net and downloading things etc and just use my high spec machine as an editing machine. I'm only going to install premiere onto this machine along with nero and some other essential programs. If i do this and follow the steps above like disabling the clock system tray I hope it'll be lightning fast!