Why is Adobe Media Encoder so slow?

Question

I have a 2.5 hour corporate event that I edited in Premiere Pro. There are AE clips, sound, imported video, the works. When I run it out to AME, the source resolution is 1440x1080 and I am downsampling to 640x480 for delivery on Vimeo.The thing is... Media Encoder is teling me that it is going to take 20 hours to render this video. Why would it take that long? I rendered last night at full resolution, it took 8 hours and produced a 27 gig MP4. I have run out video this size (previous events) with way less of a time investment. Clearly I am doing something wrong! My newbie-ness is showing something bad here.I am on a Mac Pro, 2 x 2.4 GHz Quad-Core Inel Xenon tower with 22 GB of RAM running OS 10.8.4 and the Adobe Master Suite 6.Can you make a suggestion, or maybe point me at a tutorial on render settings? I thought I had everything set right, but this is crazy!

Answer 1

Yes, I have run into HUGE file sizes before and it could be several things, one possibility is the data rate tied to the video codec. Check to see if your footage is RAW, or uncompressed (this can usually be done through QuickTime inspector or 'Get Info' in Finder). If it was encoded, check the codec. ProRes is extremely popular right now, but has high data rates therefore eats up a lot of space, and for Vimeo you really only need H.264 or H.265.

So, rather than export a Master File which preserves the Timeline Settings, see if there is an option in Media Encoder to switch to H.264 or H.265.

The second possibility: I see that given the length of the project (150 minutes), down converting frame-by-frame from 1440x1080 to 640x480 can take some time. 20 hours is a bit extreme, but in this case I'd defer you to the above, which is check the method of compression first.

The third possibility or rather observation is that the Mac Pro you are using appears to be over ten years old. You're in good company, as I am still using my 2009 Quad-Core, but you may have an earlier model. If you don't already have a SSD as your main system drive (and optimally the drive you're exporting to but that's just frosting on the cake), it may be worth checking into. You have enough RAM, but also make sure all other programs are closed when performing the encode overnight. Make sure, also, that you do not let the Mac go to sleep, or allow the hard disks to go to sleep in your System Preference Energy Saver. Allowing the Display to sleep is fine, but keep the rest of it up and running when doing this.