Hey guys, Jordy here for cinecom.net and welcome to Creative Tuesday!
Rendering a video out of Premiere Pro can never go fast enough.
Unfortunately, it could take up hours
before you can start sharing that new video with your friends.
And that’s why I've got 5 tips for you that could help speed up that process.
But I'd like to start with thanking today's sponsor which is MSI.
Apart from the 5 software tips that I have for you,
the one solution that could drastically help increase performance is your hardware.
It's not the first time that we work together with MSI,
previously they sent us a desktop computer, that honestly…
…has the best performance and runs the most stable in the office.
And they're not making me say that, it's true fact from my own experience.
My guess is, because most of the components inside are MSI,
so they're probably better adjusted to each other, I don't know.
We've got the P 65, which has incredible specs for its price point.
Some of the highlights are an Intel i7 6-core CPU,
the brand-new Nvidia RTX 2070, which we also talked about in a previous video,
and a super fast M-2 SSD.
I can easily edit my RED raw footage on this laptop.
Even with the Lumetri effect, I’m able playback the footage in real time.
Which, for a laptop, is pretty incredible.
The display itself is a very nice IPS panel, coming close to 100% sRGB.
And that is all packed within an ultra thin aluminum box,
giving you up to 8 hours of battery life.
Very soon they will also come out with an option to choose the Intel i-9 CPU,
and a 4K display.
Definitely worth to check out if you're looking for a new editing laptop,
which you can do by clicking the first link in the description below!
Now let's see how we can improve that rendering
with a few tricks inside Premiere Pro.
The first one can be found when you create a new sequence
or you right click on an existing sequence and choose Sequence Settings.
On the bottom, you'll find Video Previews.
From there you can set your desired format and codec.
I would suggest setting this into a lightweight but high quality codec,
such as Avid DNX or ProRes.
Whenever you work with effects inside Premiere Pro,
chances are that you need to pre-render them by hitting the Enter or Return key.
You're now rendering them into that Avid or ProRes codec,
which are bigger files, but they’re already good for final render.
So when you're about to export your video,
you make sure that 'Use Previews' is selected,
and that way Premiere Pro will not render your effects again,
but actually use those pre-renders, or previews,
which will drastically increase rendering speed.
Tip number 2: with the installation of Premiere Pro, comes Media Encoder.
Basically, you can drag your final sequence out of Premiere Pro into Media Encoder.
You can also open up a Premiere Pro project file in there
and then select your desired sequence.
Basically this program allows you to render your videos in the background,
so that you can continue to work inside Premiere Pro.
You can also batch-export multiple sequences over night
if you have tons of videos that need to be ready for the next day.
Leaving your computer alone is always better during an export,
but there're situations where a background export is very useful
and will actually speed up your workflow in the long run.
Now, if you're running an older version of Premiere Pro, then be aware.
Because the connection between Media Encoder and Premiere Pro
is done through Dynamic Link, which is actually super slow.
But if you make sure that you keep your apps updated,
Premiere Pro will work natively inside Media Encoder now.
From the Menu, Edit, Preferences, you will still find the option there
to import sequences natively, or not.
So, make sure that that option is selected.
The same goes under Media.
Right here you'll find an option that says 'Enable accelerated H.264 decoding.’
Definitely if you're working on DSLR footage, this option must be checked on.
Tip number 3, Let's talk about codecs!
Most DSLRs, like I mentioned before, record in H.264.
And it's also the same format that you will most likely use to export for final delivery.
Because it creates a small file size while retaining a very good quality.
This makes it perfect to upload to Youtube, or share with your friends.
Now here's an interesting fact: when you're about to export to this codec
but jump first into the settings of it, you'll find the bitrate options,
which have a drastic influence on the export time.
For starters, you have a CBR and VRB option.
CBR stands for Constant Bitrate, meaning that you assign 10 megabits per second
to your video, for example, and then Premiere Pro will exactly do that.
VBR stands for Variable Bitrate.
Choosing this gives you two bitrate options: a minimum and a maximum.
Depending on how complex your video is,
Premiere Pro will assign more or less megabytes to it.
This is great, because it will use less for simple shots
that have little detail and colors
and give a little more to shots that do have more details and colors.
Eventually your final video will be smaller in file size and still have a high quality picture.
Now, there's also an option to choose VBR 2 pass, which is essentially the same,
but Premiere Pro will first analyze your video in the first pass
and then execute the compression in the second pass.
You'll get much better results, though.
However, when we talk about decreasing the export time, CBR is the fastest,
VBR goes slower and VBR 2-pass is the slowest export of them all.
So if you're short on time, choose CBR.
A last thing to mention is that the given bitrate also influences the export time.
The higher the bitrate, the better quality your video will be
but the exporting will take longer.
So, if you're about to export a first draft of your work
that the client needs to see and it has to go fast,
you might wanna decrease the bitrate to around 5 megabits per second
for a High Definition sequence.
If you're uploading a High Definition video to Youtube,
Youtube will transcode your video again for their platform.
So it has no use to set the highest possible bitrate from your export in Premiere.
In fact, Youtube actually recommends to set your bitrate at 8 Mbps for HD.
However, it’s a recommendation from Youtube,
I'm not sure what the actual bitrates are that Youtube handles, though.
This video right here was exported using 40 Mbps in 4K resolution,
which lays in line with what Youtube recommends and it looks great to us.
So there is no use to increase that, which will only make exporting take longer.
Alright, tip number 4!
While you're editing, you might be stacking clips over different video tracks.
I think we all do that for having a better organization in the timeline
or to create a specific effect.
But here's the thing,
although you won't actually see the clip that lays underneath another clip,
it does increase export times.
And I've actually took it to the test
where I used 6 tracks with a random effect on a clip.
Next to it I also had a sequence where I would collapse
all the clips back into one track.
And you can easily do this by holding down Alt + arrow down key.
Surprisingly, for the 5 seconds clip, the export time with the stacked clips
was almost the double of the sequence that had everything in one track.
Now, I'm not saying that everyone should suddenly stop
using more than one video track.
But collapsing your clips is something to consider
if you're -again- short on a deadline
or you're just really sick of those slow exports.
And that brings us to the last tip to speed up that export.
Many of us shoot in 4K but then edit in a 1080p sequence.
That means, we scale down our footage to make it fit within the HD sequence.
There're two ways to do that.
First of all is by right-clicking on your clip
and choosing ‘Scale to’ or ‘Set to frame size’.
‘Scale to’, will resample the clip,
which is good if you decide not to enlarge it anymore,
as that gives you quality loss.
For editing, this will also speed up things.
as you're now working on a 1080 clip since it got resampled.
‘Set to frame size’, will simply scale down your clip,
but you're still working on that 4K clip.
I did several tests, but I couldn’t really find major differences
in export times between these two.
However, where I strangely enough did found a great difference
is if you would literally scale down your 4K clip to 1080 through the Motion options.
Doing this will increase the export time,
so it's better to use the ‘Scale to’ or ‘Set to frame size’ option.
And those were the 5 tips to increase that export time inside Adobe Premiere Pro.
I'm gonna leave you guys with a final bonus tip:
if you wanna do your own tests to figure out how you can improve rendering speeds
then make use to use the Media Encoder.
You could export one sequence to multiple formats
and when it's done you go up to Menu, say File, Show Log.
And in here you'll see the different exports, their settings,
and most important, how long each export took.
Thank you guys so much for watching, thank you MSI for the support.
I'm already looking forward to take this editing beast with me
when shooting my next travel video.
Definitely make sure to check out that gorgeous editing laptop, guys.
But more important:
Stay Creative!
-Guys, this might come as a shock, but I’m getting a little bit tired of my long hair,
so I made an appointment with the hairdresser and…
…is going off tomorrow.