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Premiere & Media Encoder CS4, cluster rendering, network distributed rendering

P

photographer

Hello,

I'm rendering a slideshow from photographs that will be used during a theater play to enhance certain scenes during live performance. the render is extremely demanding on my single laptop. The projector resolution is 1280x1024 - so i'm rendering it in this native resolution with H.264 - and the 90 minutes footage takes about 20 hours to render !
Is that normal? I've 2.53GHz Macbook Pro 6MB L2 cache. 4GB RAM.

I would like to setup render between 2 Macbooks Pro using Premiere CS4. But honestly i've NO CLUE how to do this. In terms of physical connection, could i just link the 2 computers using fire-wire cable or Ethernet X cable for the fastest data flow ?

Speculation on my side: Do i use the Qmaster to set this up? The other MBP has only CS3 i guess, do i need to install some CS4 component on that computer to make this possible?

I really need to speed things up. should i possibly use different codec that is less demanding then H.264 ???


appreciate your help,
Petr

www.lightimagination.net
 
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Just tossin' a few questions out there...

Your entire project is supposed to be 90 minutes, yes?

And you are using stills for all of this, yes? I'm assuming you've just stretched out the durations of each still.

Project settings match the export (at 1280 x 1024)...

Question I'd ask; are the stills you're importing (as the original footage) also at the same resolution? (Keep in mind actual pixel aspect-ratio, too.)

If not, then every single frame will be resampled & resized.

It's just a guess, and I'm thinking out loud... but that's where I would be looking.

_______

No idea on the rest of the questions. :)
 
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Sounds about right...depending on the project paramerters.

Zensteve said:
Just tossin' a few questions out there...

Your entire project is supposed to be 90 minutes, yes?

And you are using stills for all of this, yes? I'm assuming you've just stretched out the durations of each still.

Project settings match the export (at 1280 x 1024)...

Question I'd ask; are the stills you're importing (as the original footage) also at the same resolution? (Keep in mind actual pixel aspect-ratio, too.)

If not, then every single frame will be resampled & resized.

It's just a guess, and I'm thinking out loud... but that's where I would be looking.

_______

No idea on the rest of the questions. :)
Click to expand...

Good questions.

I would add...

It would be hard to say if that is the right amount of time because we do not know the project parameters(export settings/file types and sizes) can you post them?

Sometimes h.264 encodes will only take as long as the duration of the project and other times 2 and three times as long. Are you doing multi-pass? What is the bitrate?

I would suggest encoding with the native codec out of Adobe (should be really fast) then preforming the conversions with mpeg streamclip if your on OS X.

I have used qmaster to link a macbook pro and an imac 24" together for rendering (over a wireless network)....it does decrease output time a lot. I'm not sure how it work for adobe because I was using compressor from final cut studio.

Post up the parameters man and we'll have more to work with!
 
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wrong pixel aspect ratio ?

Zensteve:

Yes, it's all photos with various duration - 90 min total running time.
The export rendering setting is 1280x1024, but the photos are actually much larger - about 3000x2000. I need them larger for panning effects etc.

I'm using as well lot of transitions, opacity and blending more images together, while they are panning.
You're right, every frame needs to be resampled, but i'm trying to understand what is the slowest, most demanding time-wise to render - like the H.264 might be more demanding then other.

Provid:

The output settings i've used - this is what i read in the Premiere CS4 export settings before it's passed to the media encoder:


Format: Quicktime

1280x1024, 24fps, Lower, Quality 100
48000Hz, Stereo
H.264

Aspect D1/DV NTSC (0.9091) - i believe i've screwed here badly! It's 1.0 ration since it's all photos !!! - so was it that more demanding because it was reshaping every pixel ???

Set Bitrate - left default = unchecked, i don't know if the default is fixed or variable

Audio AAC codec 48000 stereo


------------------------------
Are there any tools within CS4 to render on multiple computers within a network ?
 
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Will Vincent said:
Reshaping and scaling.. yes.


I am quite positive that you cannot with Premiere, but After Effects will do distributed rendering without any extra third party tools...
Click to expand...

Make sense. I've missed the pixel aspect ratio during the first run. I'll give it another go with a different codec and will report the time render difference.

I've After Effects CS4, but since i do not use for this project, could i still utilize it somehow to run the render through it to gain the advantage of multiple computers processing power ?
 
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render video from still images Premiere CS4 vs. iMovie 09

I tried all i thought was wrong in Premiere, including the pixel aspect ratio. I've even tried to render in half resolution 640x512 - but still i was getting about 22 hours to render 90min of still into video!

In the end i had to launch apple iMovie 09 and actually do the slideshow there. What an increase in speed! Exporting those images with Ken Burns effects and 1 minute of real footage = 1 minute of render (640x512 in H.264 on High quality) !!! :huh:

So WHY is this ? Why is it so insanely slow to render video from stills in Premiere CS4 ???
 
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It has to do with the H.264 codec.. Premiere can render very quickly, but compressing to H.264 takes a good deal of time... Why it's so much faster with iMovie? I don't know, H.264 is notoriously slow to render on PC, so that may well have something to do with it.

The other thing is that iMovie is probably much better optimized for osx, as it's written and compiled in cocoa, rather than whatever framework Adobe is using. It's also very likely that iMovie is 64bit and/or multithreaded, which the Adobe media encoder may not be -- due to limitations with the programming framework they are using, imposed by Apple. That's why Photoshop cs4 isn't 64bit on the mac (but is on PC)
 
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Cunsumer app iMovie beats pro Premiere CS4 rendering

You must have nailed the issue. But I'm not denying my dissapointment. Pro app cannot match iMovie? Lame from Adobe that the 64-bit is only for PC. How long does a render from stills take on Windows?
 
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photographer said:
Lame from Adobe that the 64-bit is only for PC.
Click to expand...
It's not Adobe's fault....Apple killed the 64bit version of the programming framework.

Apr. 3, 2008:
"Last June Apple decided to kill 64-bit Carbon, forcing all future 64-bit application development on the Mac to Cocoa. Adobe had originally planned to ship a 64-bit CS4 as a Carbon app and port to Cocoa for CS5, but now the 64-bit version will have to wait for the CS5 Cocoa build."
 
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