Slow export times with Premiere Pro and R5 footage
Feb 18, 2022
Hi everyone,
I'm trying to figure out a workflow for shooting 4K C-log video on the Canon R5 and editing in Premiere Pro 22.2.0. I'm using an iMac / 3.6ghz 10 Core Intel i9 / 64GB RAM / AMD Radeon Pro 5700 8GB. As I understand it the R5 C-log is 10 bit, 4:2:2 and H.265.
The shooting part is great and I'm having no problem with playing, editing and rendering the footage in Premiere. I'm using a few effects like Unsharp Mask and speed changes, 4-5 After Effects comps, and 2-3 adjustment layers for grading, and all seems fine to work with. But when I export my finished video I'm finding the export time is very long - a 1 minute video is taking around 6 hours to complete. This time varies between around 4 and 6 hours depending on the export settings I use (encoding to H.264, different pixel dimensions, different bit rate quality settings, CBR and VBR etc, which allow software encoding or hardware encoding variously).
Firstly, are these sorts of export times normal / to be expected for my set up?
Is my computer spec causing the slowness? And if so, do I need more processing power, a better graphics card or more RAM? What should I be looking for in a replacement Mac?
And lastly, because changing bitrate settings and switching to hardware encoding isn't making a huge difference to export times, I'm wondering if the slow export is caused specifically by the R5 footage being H.265. Could that be right? And if so, are there any options to do things differently somewhere along the way? I've seen advice about transcoding to ProRes 422 HQ, or using proxies, to speed up rendering times during editing, but this isn't proving to be a problem for me, and I'm not sure it helps with the exporting times at the end. Presumably transcoding to ProRes 422 HQ doesn't change the footage from being H.265?
Any advice appreciated. Thanks in advance!
Thom
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