adobe premiere pro export in compressed video

Typically this is made in reference to the playback and editing, but decoding has to be done for exporting too, so it stands to reason that any format that’s faster to decode so it plays back better while editing, it will save some CPU overhead while exporting.

While there certainly are valid reasons to do this, like having 4:2:2 color support for chroma-key work, one reason I have seen noted is that ProRes is easier for the computer to decode. I’ve seen quite a few workflows that suggest that you should convert your VDSLR’s h.264 files to ProRes or DNxHD. The more data you have to decompress, the more computation time is needed to process the data even if the compression technique is less intensive. Overall the decode process has to strike a balance between the computationally complexity of compression algorithm being decoded, and the bandwidth needed to read the files and push the data around. The first step in the rendering process is decoding the source files to get at the frames that will be processed. Likewise, transcoding input files to gain efficiency, or choosing a different delivery format may not be possible and even when it is, it may not net any gains. Some of this can be accelerated by the GPU, but it only takes one slow un-accelerated effect to moot all the GPU acceleration. The processing that has to be done on any given video files is going to be dictated by the effects applied, and thus the visual look.

The trouble is, at least in my experience, that there’s not a lot that can be done to any aspect in terms of making it faster trivially. To get more done, you need to either minimize the resources needed by each step, or redistribute the resources somehow to provide more for a more demanding step.įor example, if we have 3 hypothetical video export processes, each will need to have the computer spend some time decoding and decompressing the source frame, processing it into the processed image, and then encoding and compressing the image into the exported video file. So keep in mind while reading the decode and compression sections, that the performance numbers aren’t from Premiere Pro specifically but I think they should be somewhat indicative of the expected trends.įor our purposes, we have a finite fixed amount of processing power and bandwidth available to use for rendering and exporting video. Now I should note, this isn’t a hot to guide as much as an exploration of a processes. In some cases, especially encode and decode speed, I’ve stepped away from Premiere Pro simply because it’s too difficult to extract the necessary data from it. The process can be logically broken down into 3 steps decoding the source video file to extract a frame, processing the frame by rendering the effects specified against it, finally compressing the frame in the output video format. Since I’ve been asked the question a couple of times, I thought it might be interesting to look into some of the performance aspects of the export processes. The reality is that while Premiere Pro does use the GPU for rendering exports, the process is slightly different and the results can be dominated by other factors beyond just the manipulations. The question has come up a couple of times in my article on enabling CUDA support in Premiere Pro regarding why exports still take so long even with the GPU enabled.

Adobe premiere pro export in compressed video