Adobe’s CC suite has been my main creative platform for a few years now. But some YouTubers
still rely on Vegas Pro (formerly of Sony, but now developed by Magix) - mainly because
it’s easy to pirate. For shame, please try out one of the plethora of high-quality free
or open source tools out there instead, BUT that’s besides the point. We can debate
all day whether the tools or UI of Vegas or Premiere is better, but what about render
times? Can we lock down a legitimate, proper test of a render comparison between the two?
This wound up being a HUGE rabbit hole to jump down, rather than a simple comparison.
Let’s take a look.
--Actually, I’m going to cut back in here and just say: This turned into a pretty complicated
and technical adventure. The difference isn’t a matter of A vs. B, but how the two software
utilize different optimizations. If you want the cut and dry, too-long-didn’t-watch answer
- Premiere renders faster than Vegas, rendering in HALF THE TIME. But to me, why that happens
is much more interesting. If you want to learn more, carry on --
Sometimes video ideas, no matter how obvious the idea is, come from the strangest places.
Shoutout to TheFriendlyBroski for suggesting the idea to me via Discord. I’m EposVox,
here to make tech easier and more fun today trying to compare render times on my machine
between Vegas Pro and Adobe Premiere. I’m using the latest versions of each - Vegas
Pro 14 and Adobe CC 2017 - to take advantage of the latest optimizations.
For hardware, I’m running this on my main rig - an Intel Core i7-6900K CPU with a GTX
1080. My source footage files sit on my OS drive - an Intel 750 series NVME SSD, and
my target drive to render to is a run-of-the-mill 2TB 7200 RPM desktop hard drive. (In case
you didn’t know, rendering to a different disk drive than your source footage results
in faster renders.) Normally, my source footage resides on my
Synology NAS and I use a secondary SSD on my PC as a scratch disk and media cache location
for Premiere. Vegas doesn’t let me customize this, however, so to keep things running smooth,
I kept all files local to my machine, which is more what most people probably use, anyway.
For this test, I created a sample video edit. I chose 10 video clips, of different resolutions,
frame rates, and codecs to stress the render. 1080p60 gameplay from my Elgato, 4k60 desktop
recordings from OBS, 4k60 gameplay recordings from Nvidia Shadowplay, 1080p30 webcam recording,
1080p60 camcorder shot, and so on. I also had 2 1080p60 alpha channel overlay lower-third
clips that I used in the edit. I first created the edit in Vegas, taking
note of the order and timecodes of each clip I used, so that I could carefully re-create
this in Premiere. This was tedious, especially since Vegas’s trimmer is terrible, but I
got it done. My final video was 5 minutes and 8 seconds,
ready to be rendered at 1080p 60fps and 4K 30fps. I did this so that we could compare
resolutions, frame rates, and scaling of various sizes within a more realistic edit. I also
added some fade ins and outs to certain clips, a little contrast and saturation increases
on a couple, too. So that way it wasn’t just raw converting footage.
But this brought me to my next problem - there’s 2 standard MP4 render options YouTubers use
within Vegas - MainConcept MP4 and Sony AVCMVC MP4. So I needed to render each for both formats
so we could see which one of those was faster, too - ..except the Sony AVCMVC option does
NOT allow for a high enough bitrate for my 4K30 render settings, it maxes out around
26 megabits per second, which is not enough. Also, Adobe Premiere has a “Max Render Quality”
toggle in its render settings. This increases the quality of the scaling engine during video
renders, which can sometimes slow it down. So I also rendered with and without that on.
Here are the results! In Vegas, Sony AVCMVC MP4 rendered faster than MainConcept MP4,
taking only 8 minutes, 46 seconds to render the 1080p60 file, whereas MainConcept took
about 10 minutes and 24 seconds. Oddly enough, Sony AVCMVC also produced a much smaller file,
at about 555 megabytes with an average bitrate of 15 megabits per second, versus the 1.10
gigabyte file with MainConcept. I I tried to put the same bit rate (roughly) in for
each. Weird.
However, Premiere Pro blew this time out of the park. It’s worth mentioning here that
AME, Adobe Media Encoder, often takes a long time to write file metadata to the actual
video file after the render has completed. This can take anywhere up to 5 minutes for
really obnoxious files. The render is done, CPU usage drops back down, but it does not
finish just yet. Because of this, I took note of both the time elapsed shown in AME when
it finished the render and the total render time from AME’s text log after the metadata
write was complete. For this 1080p60 file, Premiere took 4 minutes
and 55 seconds to render the file (5 minutes 15 seconds total with metadata) with max render
quality ON. With that turned off, that dropped to 4 minutes, 53 seconds, or 5 minutes 4 seconds
with the metadata. That is almost HALF the amount of time that Sony Vegas took! INSANE!
With the big CC 2017 update, Adobe has kicked serious ass with performance optimizations.
I’ve been impressed in recent months of using it, but it’s nice to see it quantified.
We see similar results with the 4K 30fps render. MainConcept in Vegas Pro took about 17 minutes
and 29 seconds to render, while Premiere took 8 minutes and 31 seconds with max render quality
on, and 8 minutes 22 seconds with max render quality off. Again, half the time to render
in Premiere. And this render would’ve been much quicker,
at least on Adobe’s side, if not for the 4k60 Guild Wars 2 gameplay footage I threw
in. This is a very high-bitrate, and insanely detailed video file that slowed the render
to a halt compared to all of the other footage in the video. But it still flew through it
compared to Vegas.
It was about at this point that I realized I might have given Premiere an unfair advantage,
just due to my natural workflow with it. As I mentioned before, I utilize a dedicated
SSD within my system JUST for the media cache files and scratch disks in the Adobe Suite.
This speeds up video editing tremendously, especially when I’m editing footage stored
over the network. This isn’t an option in Vegas. I set every
setting I could to store temporary files from the program to that SSD, but it still always
stores audio peak files and such next to the source footage. This doesn’t appear to be
an option one can change at all - I did research and found threads going back to the early
2000s requesting this feature, but to no avail. This is actually what lead me to render from
my main C: drive instead of the network in the first place, as Vegas creating peak files
over the network drive was slow as molasses. This did potentially give Premiere an advantage,
I thought, since it was utilizing a feature that Vegas could not use. So I changed the
project settings to store peak and cache files next to the source footage, closed Premiere,
deleted the old files, opened it back and allowed it to generate new data, and rendered
again, expecting a slowdown, maybe results more similar to Vegas.
NOPE NOPE NOPE! I was wrong - the renders went FASTER! Marginally. Since the drive the
files are stored on is a PCIe NVME drive that is way faster than my normal scratch disk
SSD and can handle random reads much quicker, this setup actually shaved a few seconds off
of the renders. The 1080p60 file rendered at 4 minutes 51
seconds, and the 4K30 file rendered in 8 minutes, 24 seconds! Both of these are with maximum
render quality ON!
Of course, I’m need to continue utilizing the SSD cache while editing from my network
storage, but that was an interesting comparison.
The SSD cache, scratch disk, and peak file storage is one optimization boost with Premiere,
the other being its reliance on CUDA-accelerated rendering. Vegas is infamous for not doing
a very good job with this. It recognizes my GTX 1080 and knows to use it, but that didn’t
seem to matter.
Either way, this was quite the interesting little adventure. I love doing stuff like
this, I just don’t always have the right motivation. Want to see more? Leave me suggestions
in the comments below.
Otherwise, smash the like button if you enjoyed, get subscribed for more awesome tech videos,
and I’ll catch you next time.