On my machine, Adobe Media Encoder is very slow. It takes 12 hours to render 4 minutes of 1080p video for YouTube (the video is based on Adobe After Effects project with an original MOV file and four effects: curves, remove grain, unsharp mask and hue/saturation.
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As a side note, is it expected to be that slow? I can't possibly imagine movie making companies using it to encode a movie which usually is slightly longer than 4 minutes and has slightly more than four basic effects, even with a whole data center. Removing "remove grain" effect speeds up the encoding from 12 hours to 3:30.
There might not be a way. Based on your description of the problem, it sounds like the processing is the slow part. While the video encoder itself is able to do multi-threaded processing, the image processing you are doing may not be able to. By default, Premiere has always done as much parallel processing as possible for me and I frequently see it hit 99% CPU usage on my hyper-threaded quad core desktop.
The problem is most likely that some of your effects require the result of the previous frame to begin processing on the next frame. If this is the case, there isn't an easy way to break it down across multiple threads and that would make it impossible to hit 100% CPU usage on a multi-core computer.
Similarly, RAM wouldn't be expected to cap on encoding as it is a stream operation. There are some things that may need to be tracked over time, but for the most part, it is a stream operation with data going out as fast as it comes in, so there isn't much accumulation of data.
There are two main things that can improve the performance. The first is GPU processing. General purpose CPUs aren't really ideal for many audio/video processing tasks. They are designed for doing a wide variety of general purpose operations, but aren't super efficient at basic operations. GPUs, on the other hand, are designed for doing simple operations very quickly. They can often reduce video processing tasks quite a bit.
A further improvement can be found in purpose built hardware. There are professional cards designed specifically for processing video and provide real time processing and encoding of video. These are often included in high end professional video editing workstations, but the price can be quite high. It isn't unheard of for a professional video editing workstation to be able to get up in the $15,000 to $20,000 range or even higher, just for hardware. They can go for a lot less if you don't mind waiting for renders (I work on a $2,350 system for my video work) but they can also get very high.
I'm not happy when I'm rendering unless I can actually smell burning plastic, nothing is more frustrating than AE telling you that your render won't complete until the heat death of the universe, while at the same time your CPU is barely raising a sweat. However there is something you can do about it.
After effects comes with a command line renderer called aerender.exe plain ol' aerender on mac). It's in the AE program folder. Using it is a bit challenging for people unused to the -=awesome -=power of the command line, but it is definitely worth doing if you're doing some heavy lifting in After Effects, and you want to be able to harness all the power of your machine.
The beauty of it is that you can run as many instances as you like. What I normally do is keep adding instances until I start running low on memory. I have a 40 physical core machine and it takes a lot to max out the CPU but here's a screenshot where I finally managed it. Each one of those windows is a new instance of the AE render engine:
In that example the per-frame speed of each renderer barely decreased compared to a single instance, so I achieved a speed increase of roughly 4000%. YMMV, depending on how many cores and how much ram your machine has. I went to the effort because I had a project involving very long and and reasonably complex comps. The project would simply not have got done without this technique, or I would have had to farm it out to a commercial render farm.
Of course the speed-up comes at a price, which is a slight increase in complexity of your workflow. You need to set your comps to render as image sequences, and use the multi-machine settings so that each renderer will look for the next unrendered frame. At the end if you need a movie file you'll have to do a compression pass, but in my case I usually master to a png or tiff sequence, and then run off h.264 encoded copies for clients from the master.
This is executed in a powershell window (type in WindowsR and then type powershell.exe). This is a shell scripting language integrated into modern versions of Windows that can be used for all kinds of stuff.
If you have to do simply a transcode of a file; or can use Bridge to import your PPro Project into AE (barring your edits will remain intact); the feature under Memory (Edit -> Preferences) allow for you to use Multi-threading.
If I am doing just a straight render; or something simple; I can use AE to allocate 32 of my 48 HT cores; additionally; I can allocate 3 GB of ram to each Thread; which is depending on what type of encode I'm doing, anywhere between 2-100x faster in terms of rendering even with my Dual Titan Black GPUs.
Can I suggest this is still an issue 5 years on! You need to close all Adobe apps and then open Media Encoder (if that's where you're rendering from) FIRST, then it'll assign the full resources available to that app, I haven't seen it dynamically share resources, it simply allocates CPU-time according to the number of apps open when you start the Adobe app (this is repeatable, try opening LR for example before rendering, it'll only use 10% of the CPU - then open AME first then lightroom and you'll get 100%)
Its always best to use the command line Aerender. Personally, I have a single user account with adobe, which allows me to install and run AE GUI on one, while using AERENDER on the other. No longer need to put in a text file for render only. Here's the only issue you will run into: Some plugins require separate licensing for each machine, or even render only licenses. The other issue you will run into is that each set of license for adobe software with 2 running seats (1 gui\commandline, 1 commandline render only) will require its own email address. I miss the days when you could have unlimited command line renderers so long as you had the licesnses for your plugins, but they are long gone. Adobe has also forced us to maintain multiple email addresses for this purpose, which defeats the purpose entirely. If they sold off multi-render seating, which would allow more instances to be run concurrently under the same user, similar to their institutional licensing, it would allow them to retain the email address license model, bring in more revenue, and return a once powerful function to the user community. But hey, I'm just sayin... You might, and I wouldn't bet the farm on this, but might, get around it using a set of VM files to host your software on multiple machines with one vm copy holding the software and multiple machines with copies of that VM on a closed network. You only need to update one VM, then copy it over to other machines and run it all inside a closed network with no internet (no way to limit license use). Not perfect but it might work if you only utilize it on a per project basis, allowing the main vm to connect to the internet once every week or so to update etc, and then back to the closed network and copy the vm over... ...Just sayin...There are other ways around this.Look up online render farms. They will take in your project files and render them out quickly. Some even support Premiere Pro and other applications beyond adobe software, and their pricing is pretty fair for the most part. Much faster to run a render with 20 cores and pay $5 to $10 US, get an output file in your desired format and go to print. For 10 bucks, I'll save the headache and just do the upload. Of course, you're best off with a wired network and a ton of bandwidth.Option 2:You could find a boxed CS6 with a valid key, apply it to your licensing online, and install the full on your main box, then buy a bunch of i5\i3 machines slap some nvidia 1-2gb cards in them, add 4-16gb of ram, and network them together. Then you could hook them to RAID NAS drives, one input, one output, and use the Render only setting from cs6 to have your very own render farm. This isn't cheap. About 5 grand for all of it with a 20 core running farm. You then have to install something to initiate the farm on each machine. There are some good softwares for that too. Then, open premiere, save project and files to input RAID, send the entire sequence to after effects, save that file with a render queue, and put into your farm initiator, let the other 10 machines work on it, Have one machine set up with media encoder to watch the folder and compress the output to a final file on your main machine. You can have a coffee (or a beer), then start the next project, and since there is only one set of writes going to the input nas, but many reads, it will be slow going at first. I suggest a third device for cache files, and raid-ed ssds on all of them (get cheapos, it'll be okay, just factor in the wear and tear to your pricing for clients; for personal work or sidehustle, you're better off with used disks, as cheap as you can get them, and replace them when they begin to have problems).
For a quad core / 4 threadded machine like mine, this made Media Encoder jump from 1 core to using 96% of all four. You must watch the youtube video "Render 300X FASTER Premiere / After Effects / Media Encoder " I'm successfully using this with CC 2018 products.
I have spent many hours watching tutorials und trying to understand everything as best as I could. I followed the advice of many to change my workflow to ACES (Cinema 4D / Redshift). But for some reason nobody is talking about exporting the footage from After Effects. Every tutorial I have watched ends right there in After Effects. So my question is: what is a good way to export from After Effects. I have found out that I can export mp4 directly from AE 2023 via the render queue, but if I use media encoder, it is not working correctly. Why? If I use After Effects Beta and I use the built in Converter, my Media Encoder gives a warning message, that the color conversion was not successful.
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