About a month ago now, I built a new editing PC,
because my old rig was starting
to show its age, and I was also excited to take advantage
of that new feature in Premiere Pro
which allows hardware-accelerated encoding
using Intel Graphics.
Today, we're going to talk about that setting
and why I do not recommend using it.
Let's get Undone!
[offbeat music]
♪ Gerald Undone ♪
♪ He's crazy ♪
What is happening, everybody? I'm Gerald Undone
and today's video is all about exporting video
from Premiere Pro. So, let's start off by setting
the stage a little bit with my PC and putting out
a couple quick disclaimers.
So first up, this is not a brand bashing video.
I'm not recommending one brand over the other
and I don't want to fuel into the AMD versus Intel debate.
In fact, I've been quite happy with this upgraded rig
over my previous one,
and I've enjoyed huge performance gains
in pretty much every phrase of my workflow.
Secondly, I'm not in any way asserting that my results
are the final word on this topic, and as with most things,
your mileage may vary. I do, however,
have a lot of experience with Premiere Pro,
with building PCs, and with this particular type
of workflow. Lastly, when I say my old rig,
I'm referring to an Intel i7-2600K
using an NVIDIA GTX 970. It had 24 gigs of RAM
and it was overclocked to 4.7GHz,
and it was running on quality SSDs.
It was a decent performer, but as my 4K edits started
to get more complex, I was losing a lot of time
with dropped frames, with scrubbing delays
and with the application of effects.
The new rig is an Intel i7-8700K,
overclocked to 4.9GHz.
It has an NVIDIA GTX 1080 in it,
it has super fast NVME drives and 32 GB of RAM.
My 4K timeline is significantly smoother on the new rig
and my workflow has been significantly sped up.
I'm happy, the build went well, no issues,
and I grabbed some nice sales, all is well.
Now, I want to show you some numbers
with the exports of the before and after,
the old rig and the new rig using Premiere,
oh, and for those of you that are curious,
I always have the latest version of Premiere,
and right now, that is 12.1.2 (Build 69)
as of this recording.
Alright, so I did an export before and after the upgrade,
using the same project. This was a typical project for me
intended for a YouTube video.
We've got 4K footage at 24p. It was an MP4 container
using H.264. It's usually between 8 and 12 minutes,
but this particular one was just over 11 minutes.
It had [audio clearing] audio effects
[normal audio] colour grade, transitions
and a bunch of picture-in-picture stuff,
which would have 1080p, screen captures, sort of,
like, you know, mixed in with the footage.
Uh, there is on screen animations like I do often
and some segments with multiple 4K video,
in multiple layers that would have masks in order to,
sort of, integrate the footage together.
There was also lots of motion and position key frames,
but I wasn't using any warp stabilisers
or anything like that. On my old rig, this type of timeline
would only be tolerable at points until it reached
the heavier areas, which it would just become
pretty much unusable unless I rendered it out first,
but on the new rig, it's pretty good
all the way through with very few dropped frames.
Now, when it comes to exporting for YouTube,
the settings that I typically use are 4K, 24p
in an MP4 with H.264. I render at maximum depth
and maximum quality, those are both checked.
I use high profile, the level is 5.1
and I use 2-pass Variable Bit Rate
with the target set to 24 Mbps
and the maximum set to 96 Mbps.
Also, I export using Premiere Pro
and not Media Encoder. When I did these tests
with Media Encoder, they were typically--
took about 5-6% longer versus using the internal exporter
inside of Premiere Pro. When using these settings
to export on the old rig, it took me 41.3 minutes
to complete, and this is averaged out
after exporting three times.
Now, on the new rig though, it took me 23.1 minutes,
again, averaged out over three runs.
So, that was a pretty nice jump for me,
nearly cutting my export time in half,
and I wanted to give you all this information
about my before and after, in case you were considering
a similar upgrade to me, and maybe the Intel hardware
encoding thing was a factor, which we're just about
to get into, but I wanted to tell you that excluding
that Intel hardware encoding thing as a factor,
I am still quite happy with this upgrade
because of these gains that I described earlier
and I definitely think it was worth it,
even though I don't use the Intel hardware encoding.
Now, let's get into that Intel stuff.
So, after I did those tests and I had my baseline,
I had eager to see how much more I could even improve
my results now that I had that Intel hardware encoding
option in the drop down that I didn't have before
in the old rig, so I went into Premiere Pro,
into the export window, and I dropped down
Hardware Encode and right away, I was greeted
with my first disappointment that nobody mentioned
in any of the videos that I watched leading up
to building the computer, which is that the 2-pass option
is just not available. There's quite a few posts
in the forums of people saying, "Why can't I choose hardware?
Why can't I choose hardware?", and it's because,
if the encoder isn't set up exactly within the confines
of what is allowed for the hardware encoding,
you just can't use it. It'll say that's not compatible,
and so one of those limitations is that you can't use
2-pass, you can only use 1-pass. That was disappointing
because I use 2-pass all the time, and this is going to be,
kind of, a common theme going forward,
about the videos that I watched leading up to it
not mention it because when this feature
was announced two months ago,
my feed was slammed with all these videos, like,
"Amazing new feature!", "Switching back to Intel",
"Extreme speeds", yada yada, and they were comparing
with benchmarks and with bar graphs how, like,
a medium to high-tier processor can match some
of the extreme enthusiast X-series processors out there,
with export times by enabling this
Intel hardware encoding, and that's troublesome to me,
because, obviously, those extreme processors,
they don't have the IGPU features that allow them
to enable the use of hardware encoding,
so they have to do it the old-fashioned way,
but don't be fooled. These processors are not
the same thing, but we're going to get to that in a few seconds.
Anyway, so as I was saying,
nobody really mentioned that it was only 1-pass,
and of course, 1-pass is much faster than 2-pass,
so when I did that test, the results for the hardware
encoding was significantly faster
than my 23.1 minute tests from before.
I did it in 12.1 minutes
using the new hardware accelerated Intel thing.
Again, over a three run average.
So, that's nearly twice as fast as my previous export,
which, of course, would make for a great bar graph,
but this isn't comparing apples to apples.
So, I had to go back again and test my software settings,
but this time, choose the 1-pass encoding,
and I kept pretty much everything the same, you know,
24 Mbps, etc. All I did was change it
to VBR 1-pass, and when I did the export that time,
the results were 12.5 minutes instead of the 12.1 on hardware,
which is hardly as impressive
and does not make for as interesting of a bar graph,
it's only a few percent difference.
Now, there's no sense complaining about
that few percent if it's free. It's a free couple percent
improvement, why not, right? Except for, regardless
of how many times I did it, I kept getting
the same recurring problem, which is this--
crazy glitches and artifacts that would roll over
the screen and they would occur once every five
to six minutes on an average. Now, I ran this export
well over 15 times, changing one thing at a time to see
if I could eliminate what was causing these artifacts
and glitches. I even used the different encoders,
the H.265 one which is the other one that allows
the Intel hardware accelerated encoding option
and I couldn't eliminate the problem.
No matter what I did, which included changing
the drivers, rolling back to old drivers,
changing the configuration inside of Premiere Pro,
changing my overclock settings, I was still getting
these glitches about one to two times per video,
or about every five to six minutes.
I concluded that it must just be instability within
that Intel hardware encoder, but I couldn't find
any resources about it on the internet.
And, not a single one of those videos
that I mentioned earlier that were hyping this thing
ever mentioned anything about artifacts or glitches,
but maybe they weren't actually watching
the videos back, they were just exporting them
and recording the times for the sake of the benchmarks.
Now, another peculiar thing that I noticed
about the videos is that in order to make
the comparisons and do the tests,
they needed the control against the Intel hardware one
and for the control test,
they were setting it to software only,
but they weren't setting it to software
in the export window, which is the only fair way to do it,
they were setting it to software only
in the project settings inside the Rendering
and Playback option. Now this doesn't really make
any sense at all because you're crippling your machine
to not even using your dedicated GPU,
and you're using only software where if you do it
in the export window, you're basically just turning
the Intel hardware thing on and off,
and it doesn't really make any sense how not having
the Intel hardware thing should make you not be able
to use your dedicated GPU, it's not like it disappears
from your system if you don't use
the Intel hardware acceleration. But, I mean,
it makes for more compelling bar graphs
because having software only without
any CUDA acceleration at all,
obviously gets absolutely crushed by having
CUDA acceleration and Intel hardware acceleration,
and I think this is the reason why my tests were so much
closer together than their tests
because theirs were comparing having, basically,
two GPUs to zero and mine was comparing
having the exact same, much more useful,
dedicated GPU and turning the Intel thing on and off,
which makes for less significant results when it comes
to H.264, like I said, it's less than 5% difference.
Now, I specified H.264 because when I was testing H.265
in order to see if I could get rid of those glitches
and artifacts, I did notice that there was a greater
disparity between having the Intel hardware thing
on and off when exporting using H.265,
because my numbers were 18.1 minutes
when using software, but when I enabled Intel hardware
acceleration, it went to 12.3 minutes. So that is actually,
I mean, that's, that's a decent gain compared to 12.5
and 12.1 or whatever, I mean,
that's a noticeable difference. But, unfortunately,
the H.265 was also a victim to the 1-2 seconds
of garbled, artifact-ridden chaos every five
to six minutes. And again, all of this is only relevant
if you plan to do 1-pass encoding.
If you're a 2-pass person like me,
then this Intel hardware acceleration thing
is a complete non-starter. So in conclusion,
after all my tests, I'm gonna go back to software only
with regard to the Intel GPU.
I'm obviously going to leave NVIDIA hardware
acceleration CUDA on, and I'm going to go back to,
VBR 2-pass because I like that best and it's glitch free
and it's still so much faster than my old rig was.
In the end, for me, the Intel hardware acceleration
option introduced a few months ago in Premiere Pro,
while significantly faster in very specific,
targeted benchmarks, offers no real advantage to a user
trying to get the highest quality exports possible.
If, however, you just wanted it for the ability to make
proofing versions that you can export as quickly
as you can where glitches and quality don't really matter,
then maybe you'll enjoy having the hardware acceleration.
But for me, personally, I'd rather lose
that extra 5--well, 3% of time
to be able to send my client something glitch free
using VBR 1-pass software,
rather than just save a little bit of time
and present those strange artifacts in my video.
Also, something I forgot to mention earlier,
but the file sizes were not consistently different
using one export method over another,
meaning, basically, that if you're trying
to conserve file size, Intel hardware acceleration
will not really offer you any benefit in that regard.
And so, combining all this information,
this is why I made that comparison earlier
to the high-end X-series processors from Intel
or even the Threadrippers from AMD.
Those processors are just much faster without gimmicks,
much in the same way that my new rig is much faster
than my old rig. It's not because of some drop down box
that was added to Premiere Pro,
the hardware is just better. Now, the pricing
on those extreme, enthusiast chips goes way up,
sure, but what annoyed me was some of the videos
that were suggesting that they were going to switch back
to Intel from some high-end AMD chip
because of this new hardware accelerated
drop down feature, and that just makes no sense to me.
If you're on an AMD system with a high-end processor
and you're getting the results you want,
this is not a feature to be switching platforms for,
because those high-end AMD chips, just like the X-series
Intel processors are going to pull the numbers
that you want using the settings that you want,
regardless if you want to use some 2-pass VBR
on some strange codec, they're going to have your back.
This Intel hardware encoding feature is so limited
in use and scope that it does not compare
to those extreme processors in any regard except
for very particular, synthetic benchmarks,
and it's nothing to fanboy about,
and this is coming from somebody that's been happily
using Intel for over 20 years and is still happy
with Intel today. But like I said in the beginning,
my results might be different from yours,
so I'd love to hear what your experience is with
this Intel hardware encoding feature in Premiere Pro--
if you've used it, whether you like it or not,
and how it's affected your results with regard
to quality and export times. Please let me know
in the comments below. But that's going to be it
for me. I hope you found this video helpful,
or at least entertaining, and if you did,
make sure you leave it the old thumbs up
and consider subscribing if you haven't already,
but if you did not find this video helpful or entertaining,
feel free to hit the dislike button twice.
Alright... I'm done.