CS4 Trancoding - So Slow not wirth doing!

Question

Hi guys,
Been working with Premiere and Encore for years.
Just got my upgrade last week to CS4. Wooo - I was very excited! Lots of great new feature which could really improve DVD creating workflow...how wrong I was....
Once edited in Premiere, I load Encore and import the un-rendered sequences into Encore. This is a fab idea as any changes to the sequence automatically changes in Encore, this works well, but... the render time are HUGE!
Encore rendering of the import sequences are x3 of that of the new Media Encoder CS4. It is sooo slow at rending!
So this excellent feature is fairly pointless with the poor encode times.
Is anyone else found this ? Adobe any fix for this ?
Thanks for listening! Shaun
PS: To export still files frome Preimere's timeline is now a 5 minute job, unlike all other version of the program where a still grab took seconds...thats another story!

Answer 1

Some suggestions for you to try here.
1 - Can you confirm the footage is indeed HDV, and not some other form of HD (at last count I got to around 23 different proprietary HD formats, with every manufacturer having their own type. HDV is MPEG-2 transport streams, not full frame uncompressed HD)
2 - Dump the MP3 files please. The odds are extremely high that these will be at the wrong sample rate, and will have to be internally transcoded to 16/48 WAV files, via an interim 32-bit Floating Point stage. Much better to feed Premiere with the correct sample rate, as although you
i can
apparently mix & match sample rates, this is definitely
i not
recommended in any circumstances.
It seems to me that there is an awful lot of background transcoding going on here:
Audio from MP3>WAV, HDV>SD, Titling etc.
All this will hammer system resources - especially with Dynamic Linking as well. What are your system specs please?
It might be worth trying to compile your main timeline edit first, and set this to render out to elementary streams
i without
titling. Once the export/render queue has been set up in Premiere & the AME invoked, close the AME - do not start the render queue.
Save the Premiere project, and close Premiere.
Then open up the standalone version of AME, and perform your render. This will save on memory (Premiere is not fully open working in this way, and resources are nothing like as much of a problem) and give you the edited & compiled timeline with PCM audio as 2 elementary streams.
Now re-launch Premiere and create a new project for final POST work & addition of titling etc. Once you are happy with this, then render out again - or if you really want to use the Dynamic Linking then this is the time to invoke it.
I suspect the troubles are being caused by several things that on their own would be fine, but all taken together in such an intense project are just overwhelming your resources. Editing HDV footage alone can cause terrific strain on a system (Again, it would be very useful to know your system specs here - with HD, I would have things set up so that your C drive is simply running OS/Applications, and have separate physical (not partitions) drives for Video Capture, and another separate HDD for Audio files with yet a third drive for preview files & temp files (scratch discs). Otherwise your drives will swap their way to IBM heaven in next to no time at all.
A complex project like this IMHO is simply putting far too much stress on your setup.
As a final suggestion, can I say that the way we would handle this is to split the project into sections, and do each one separately.
So - the workflow (for me, anyway) would be as follows:
1 - Capture & edit Video & Audio*. Render to a new file.
2 - Create new project & add titling and do any colour grading. Render to a new file or Dynamic Link to Encore.
3 - (if not using Dynamic Linking) Create new project in Encore, and import elementary streams and menus for authoring.
* = All Audio files should be as 16/48 (or even better still, 24/48) PCM WAV files, not MP3, and definitely not with mixed sample rates. If necessary, resample from 44100 to 48000 before importing to your NLE)
We always split tasks - and in a project of this obvious complexity it will certainly assist you with clients, as you can get the client to sign off on each stage of the project.
I hope this helps