Premiere Pro Enable Hardware Encoding

[Lavonna Baldree]

Withthe release of Premiere Pro version 14.2, you can take advantage of dedicated H.264 and H.265 (HEVC) encoders provided by NVIDIA and AMD on Windows-based systems. These encoders can accelerate the encoding (export) performance when using H.264 and H.265 (HEVC) codecs in the export settings.

Please, note that a few of the Pascal, Maxwell and Kepler series NVIDIA GPUs don't support the H.264/H.265 encoding. NVIDIA GPU based Hardware Encoding won't be available on these GPUs.

Though, if you have an Intel CPU with Quick Sync support, then that can be used for Hardware Encoding (but it might not be as fast as NVIDIA based encoding).

Also, please ensure that you have the latest NVIDIA/AMD drivers installed on your system. If after installing the latest driver you are still not able to utilize Hardware Encoding, try doing a clean installation of GPU drivers. Here is how to do it.

On macOS, Hardware Encoding is done through Video Toolbox. There is no change on macOS based systems with regards to Hardware Encoding in Premiere Pro 14.2.

(to be able to use Hardware Encoding on macOS, please ensure to have macOS 10.13.5 or later).

I am so new to Premiere Pro use (a little over a month) I am not experienceing crashes but massively slow exports. What use to take about 8 minutes or less is now taking almost a half an hour or more! Not sure about all the lingo.

But for accelerated decoding (e.g. for faster editing) of HEVC or H.264 using Nvidia you have to use a free plugin like Turbocut / Daniel2 which can significantly accelerate your editing and also export. The plugin is free and for HEVC support requires at least a Nvidia GTX10x0 series card.

The speed impact is most visible on machines with less than 8 cores. Machines with 12, 16 or more cores can make up for the missing hardware decoding by brute CPU force, but therefore are burning more electricity for no real gain, especially if a Nvidia card is installed anyway.

I am editing UHD60 HEVC video absolutely snappy on my three and something year old Dell XPS15 with Core i7 7700HQ 4-core CPU and Nvidia GTX1050 GPU. Using Quicksync decoding is sluggish in comparison and exporting (which also requires decoding first) is twice as long.

I looked at some benchmarks from a 1080ti that compared nvidia with voukoder and daniel2, seems the nvidia solution built into premiere for encode / decode is WAY faster for encodes. I have a 2080TI, 18 core 10980xe, all nvme ssd's, and 128GB ram.

I am very disappointed to tell you this, but that GT 1030 does not have a hardware encoder at all! Therefore, you are permanently stuck with software-only encoding until you upgrade the graphics card to something better.

First, "hardware encoding" for H.264/5 is totally dependent on your CPU or mobo having the right bits for that work, not all do. You didn't post your computer specs, so we can't tell if yours does or not.

Second, NO application can do two-pass H.264/5 encoding as a "hardware" encode ... period. Because that is dependent on your CPU analyzing the sequene/section to be encoded ... the first pass. The second pass is the actual encoding.

That is correct. The GT 1030 uses a GP108 chip that does not have a built-in hardware decoder or encoder at all. And in this case, like all GP108-based GPUs, NVDEC and NVENC is completely absent from the chip. There's absolutely nothing (decoder and encoder-wise) at all to disable. These features simply never existed in that GP108 chip in the first place.

EDIT/CORRECTION: The GT 1030 desktop GPU does have NVDEC but no NVENC. It is the only GP108 chip-based GPU that left the hardware H.264/HEVC decoder enabled. In other words, the GT 1030 has hardware decoding but not hardware encoding support.

i am disappointed that I paid a lot of money for an upgraded machine, and premiere pro cannot use hardware encoding when I want the bit rate to be CB or VBR2 pass. It will only allow software encoding which takes incredibly longer. I only want to export high quality projects and this is making me unable to do so ina reasonable time frame.

What you're trying to do is currently impossible regardless of hardware and software. This (hardware encoding supported only in VBR 1-pass) is imposed by all of the GPU makers. No software can circumvent this restriction.

Try doing the exact same thing in DaVinci Resolve or Final Cut Pro, and you will find that although those software may let you select hardware encoding, only to get slammed ungracefully into software-only encoding immediately upon the start of exporting.

That is simply NOT true. Where did you get this info from? VBR 2 Pass is much better in quailty and MACS should be able to handle it. I have the EXACT same specs as above who posted on this page. Its extremely concerning that Adobe NOR APPLE for that matter has made this problem aware. Its extremely fustratiting because I paid so much money for this only to use Premeir Pro. Not I am stuck in a hard place.

Adobe, PLEASE create an update and sort this issue out. Apple Tech has said that they cant do much from your side, they have created an computer that can handle that but its Adobe who has not invested into coming with a solution.

Perhaps you can consider the following approach: export a ProRes 422 Quicktime file and then use an encoder (could be Media Encoder) to transcode that to a VBR2 pass h.264 or h.265. Please bear in mind that h.265 encoding will bog down most any system.

Hello all, I am putting my new 14" Macbook Pro (base configuration 8-core M1 Pro) through its paces and noticed that I only have access to Software Encoding in Premiere and Media Encoder when using H.264 (Match source, high bitrate -- and I did try changing it to CBR rather than VBR per some other forum suggestions; that made no difference)

For anyone who comes across this later -- it seems this issue was in my Memory settings. "Optimize rendering for:" was set to Performance, rather than Memory -- once I set it to Memory, Hardware Encoding became available.

It is only about whether your CPU has the extra hardware bits specifically used for 'hardware' long-GOP encoding. It has nothing whatever to do with your GPU or GPU accelerated effects within Premiere.

And the controls for long-GOP "Hardware" versus "Software" encoding are found in the Preferences dialog, and also in the Export dialog if you have chosen a long-GOP preset for H.264/265 HEVC.

I'm still having this issue. I just got myself a new Macbook M1 Max and have the same problem.

I cannot render with Hardware Encoding if I choose CBR. It only works when I switch to VBR 1 PASS. Switching to H.264 or H.265 doesn't help either.

Furthermore, I certainly don't see any problem to export in VBR 1 pass (Hardware encoding). But unfortunately I don't see any option to use VBR 2 pass either. I can only select CBR or VBR 1 pass.

Cheers

Jonas

CBR uses the same bitrate for every frame. But frames with lower levels of details and motion and such actually do not need the same bitrate for a good image as frames with a ton of fine detail. But using CBR, the computer has to create and then process as many bits for low-detail frames as for high-detail frames.

Using VBR means that when there's a use for high bitrate, you get it. When there isn't, you don't get it ... because you don't need it. And yes, this has been shown many, many times in 'live' testing and presentations.

Dear Neil,

Thank you so much for your information and help. But after having this new Macbook M1 Max for about a week I am experiencing more and more issues when working with Premiere Pro (2023) 23.0. Not only with slow renders but also when editing. Mostly Sony A7IV footage (XAVC S or S-I)

I've looked up so much on the internet about this, but can't find any solution as to why my new macbook runs premiere pro so slow. I'm starting to think there is something wrong with this model.

I tried using Resolve and it runs pretty smoothly. But i'm so used to Premiere.

Cheers

Jonas

DaVinci Resolve 18 makes it difficult to tell if "hardware acceleration" is being used for H264 and H265 exports as the Export Option simply reads "Use hardware acceleration if available".

For Premiere Pro or DaVinci Resolve, I would transcode Sony A7IV footage (XAVC S or S-I) to ProRes 422 HQ or ProRes 422 LT. XAVC is a great CODEC for in camera acquisition of picture, but it's not a great CODEC for editing. Sony makes Sony Catalyst Prepare available for transcoding to ProRes, but it's easier to do it via Premiere Pro's Ingest project settings.

Jonas, I highly recommend that you take one of your current Sequences that uses Sony A7IV camera original footage and make a duplicate Sequence with "_ProRes" added to the duplicate Sequence name. Select all of the Clips, right-click and use Render and Replace transcode Individual Clips to ProRes 422 LT. 60 minutes of source footage should take about three minutes to transcode and require about 42GB of storage space. When that is finished, change the duplicate Sequence settings to Custom QuickTime Apple ProRes 422 LT. You'll be prompted to delete Render Files (click OK). Close the Sequence Timeline and re-open it. You'll notice that the Yellow Preview Render line appears much less frequently if at all. Re-render if needed. You'll notice that that is much, much faster being ProRes to ProRes. Export both the Sequence that uses Sony camera original footage and the duplicate that uses ProRes to the "Match sequence preview settings" Preset. Take not of the export times. Export both Sequences to MP4 and also take note of the export times. Also keep in mind that ProRes can be uploaded to FrameIO, Vimeo and YouTube. If you try Resolve, it defaults to ProRes HQ for the "Optimized" setting under macOS, but it can be set to ProRes LT or DNx. Premiere Pro supports more choices for "Smart" editing, but you're on a computer with encoding engines for ProRes so use ProRes unless something about your workflow were to require DNx. If you were to ever switch to Avid Media Composer, your Sony footage would be transcoded to DNx when ingested.

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