One of my biggest complaints about Premiere Pro
has always been the lack of GPU encoding on export.
It always takes me three times longer to render anything
in Premiere, even though I have a modern graphics card.
Well thankfully, the latest update to Premiere
has added support for NVIDIA hardware encoding
and the results are everything I'd hoped they'd be.
Let's get undone.
[offbeat music]
♪ Gerald Undone ♪
♪ He's crazy ♪
What's happening everybody? I'm Gerald Undone
and I love it when a plan comes together.
So, first up, let's get the numbers out of the way
because I'm sure what you really want to know
is how much faster it is. Well, I did a bunch of exports
from different starting codecs, all rendering a 15 minute video
And here's what I got.
Actually, I should mention this video is sponsored by NVIDIA.
Not by Adobe. NVIDIA Studio has partnered with Adobe
to bring this feature to Premiere Pro,
but I have no monetary interest in Adobe.
That being said, I am a big fan of NVIDIA.
I typically recommend their GPUs for video editing
because of how well the NLEs that I use
leverage their CUDA cores. The reason why I agreed
to make this video is because I think it's only fair
to show when a product improves the very things
I've been complaining about. So, credit where credit's due
because these results are very compelling.
The green is the new NVENC hardware option
and the blue is the traditional CPU-only render.
And as you can see, by the timescale along the bottom
the NVENC exports are taking on average only 31% of the time
the software encoder does, going from 17 minutes
down to five minutes encoding RAW,
and from 12 minutes down to three minutes
when doing an H.264 to H.264 export.
And they're just as good in H.265, which is the other codec
this update supports, seeing very similar time savings
on average from 15 minutes down to just over four.
And these results were using a somewhat modest system.
For the CPU I was running an i7-8700K clocked at 5GHz
and the GPU is the NVIDIA GTX1080.
And I should note that you'll need at least
a 10 Series graphics card or above
to use this feature in Premiere, so a 10 Series Pascal
or a 20 Series Turing card. More good news though
is that you're also not really giving anything up
for these increased speeds. I compared six different
sets of exports and couldn't find any visual differences
between them, and most importantly
the file size doesn't increase that much.
It does get a little larger using NVENC,
but only by about 5% on average,
which is a tiny penalty to pay to save hours of your life.
To put that into practical terms though,
on a 15 minute export with a 24Mbps bit rate,
you're going from 2.55GB on the software encoder
to 2.69GB using NVENC. And if you use H.265,
you'll go from 1.71GB to 1.79GB, which, like I said,
is a very acceptable trade-off in my opinion.
Now, before this update, Premiere already had
GPU accelerated effects and transitions,
and those continue to exist. Anytime you see
this little symbol next to an effect, it'll be accelerated.
Just make sure you have the following options enabled.
Under File, Project Settings, General,
make sure you're using CUDA GPU acceleration.
And under Edit, Preferences, Media, check off
"Enable hardware accelerated encoding and decoding."
Also, I'm not sure if it's the latest update to Premiere
or better GPU integration, but I found the timeline
feels a lot smoother in this version than I remember.
Let me know in the comments if you think so too.
But to show you a comparison of how the timeline performs
without CUDA acceleration, check this out.
OK, so I've got a little test timeline here
that has a few things going on.
We've got a Blackmagic RAW clip
and then there's different clips over top of it.
Some are H.264, some are DNx. And we have a text layer
and there's a colour grade on all of them,
but including this one, and the advantage is that Lumetri Color,
as you can see with the symbol here, is an accelerated effect.
So, when we have GPU rendering on,
we can decode the file types that are supported
by the decode. We can also accelerate our colour grade,
and also pay attention to the yellow bar along the top,
which means that it's not rendered,
but that it is playable. And that's going to turn to red
when we take off the CUDA acceleration in a minute.
And we also have this little green light here
which lets you know if there's any dropped frames.
It'll stay green if there's no dropped frames,
it'll turn yellow if there are some.
So, let's just play it back and see.
So, we've got text layer spinning,
we've got a colour grade, and it'll cut to different--
it'll cut to a different clip in a minute here,
but as you can see, there are zero dropped frames
as we cut through. And we can scrub,
and even if we scrub through and then, say, play it back here
it continues playing with no issues
and still, zero dropped frames.
But now, if we go up to File, Project Settings, General,
and change it to Software Only, which disables
the CUDA acceleration, now we can see this bar turns red
and press play. Well, look how long it takes
just to start playing, and immediately this turns yellow.
35 dropped frames, 91 dropped frames, 125,
and you can see the text layer is having a heck of a time
just trying to spin in place like that.
And scrubbing through like this is brutal,
it takes forever to, sort of, respond.
And playback is nearly impossible.
Now, as far as configuring Premiere to use NVENC
when rendering, in your Export settings,
choose either H.264 or H.265 for the format,
which should allow you to choose "Hardware Encoding"
under performance. If it gives you an error,
you probably have something enabled that doesn't work
with NVENC, such as 2 pass encoding.
Just put that back to 1 pass and you should be good to go.
Here's the settings I used for my tests.
Now, there are some other advantages I noticed
during my testing. I didn't have a single render error
when using NVENC, but I did have a couple
when using software encoding. Of the 16 exports I did,
eight hardware and eight software,
two of them had to be repeated on the software side
due to render errors or program crashes.
One using H.264 and one using H.265.
But with hardware encoding I had no such errors.
So, not only is time saved in render minutes,
but you're also going to be saving the time
that you would spend on reopening the program
and restarting the export. Now, this component
is a lot more anecdotal since I didn't run hundreds
of exports to give you the proper fail rate numbers,
but if you're someone who's had problems
with rendering in the past, using NVENC with this update
might alleviate some of those issues.
Also, when using software encoding,
Premiere just refused to render H.265 at the highest quality
and I had to drop it down to "Good" to get it to export.
Where with NVENC, not only was I able
to increase the quality all the way up to the highest setting
and successfully render, but I also shaved 11 minutes
off my export time. Pretty great.
Also, for those of you that have gotten this far
but aren't as into computers or editing
and are thinking, "That's all well and good,
but what the hell is an NVENC anyway?"
Well, let's nerd out on that one for a minute.
So, first off, if you haven't seen my video on codecs
I highly recommend you watch that
because that'll go deeper into what H.264 is
and the differences between codecs and containers and so on.
And that's important because NVENC is sort of
an abbreviated brand name for NVIDIA's Encoder.
And you might sometimes see NVDEC,
where the DEC stands for Decoder.
And encoding and decoding is a big part of video.
In fact, "Codec" is actually a portmanteau
of Coder/Decoder and details the form, and function,
and possibly compression of your video stream.
So, when somebody says, "What codec did you use?"
they're kind of asking "How was this file encoded
and how should I decode it?" Now, when you try
to playback a video that's heavily compressed
or encoded in a sophisticated way,
that can be taxing on your CPU.
That process is the decode. And when you're finished
editing and you want to turn your project
into a shareable format, you'll have to encode it
into a more manageable file, which, again,
is something that your CPU is not
the most efficient device for. You need your CPU
to do so much already during your edit
that also expecting it to completely handle
these encoding and decoding tasks
slows down your editing performance
and leaves your GPU mostly unused, which is silly
because NVIDIA GPUs are much better
at performing these tasks than your CPU.
And when utilized correctly by the NLE,
they can work in tandem with your CPU
to not only greatly improve your timeline responsiveness,
but save you a lot of render time, as I showed on my graphs.
And so, it's a great day for Premiere users
because time is everything and now, you'll have more of it.
But that's gonna be it for me. I hope you found this video
entertaining or at least helpful. 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,
try setting the playback speed to 75%.
Alright... I'm done.