How to Render (4K) Videos Faster in Premiere Pro?

"26min video needs 68 hours to render. Need faster rendering!"

"2.5 hours to render a 12min GoPro video in 4k on Windows 10 - Too long!"

Slow video rendering/exporting in Adobe Premiere Pro or After Effects is a pain in the neck, despite amazing effects they finally present. How to render videos faster? This page is to help you learn the ropes. You will get total 10 ways to speed up video rendering in Premiere Pro, ranging from fastest render settings to using GPU renderer.

Part 1 - FAQs about Fast Video Rendering

Do I need to render before exporting Premiere Pro CC?

Render video if you:
1. Need a smooth playback of video sequences full of effects.
2. Will export video in the same codec used in the preview file.

What decides video rendering time?

Answer from Adobe community professional Rick Gerard:
"Rendering time depends entirely on workflow, source footage in the composition, frame rate, effects, and your system."

What would help speed up video rendering?

Both CPU and GPU affect video rendering speed. Others like hard drive and RAM space are also important. Large amounts of RAM are especially needed when dealing with large 4K and long-GOP videos.

Is a graphics card a big deal for video rendering on PC?

A graphics card supporting hardware acceleration is crucial for faster video rendering and exporting, especially when rendering and encoding UHD 4K files, over 8 million pixels. How does GPU affect render time? Three main parts during video editing - decode, render and encode - in the picture above can be accelerated using GPU, cutting down on rendering time, from dozens of hours to minutes perhaps.

Is video rendering more CPU or GPU intensive?

That depends on you using GPU renderer or software renderer. Video rendering could be more GPU intensive if you enable CUDA/OpenCL acceleration. And the graphics card's ability might be the bottleneck deciding how faster your video rendering could be if you ever add effects or do color corrections. Know more about GPU rendering >

Part 2 - How to Render (4K) Video Faster

To be clear, spending 2 hours to render a 12-minute video in 4K is not as time consuming as you might think. Because as video resolution goes up, the data to be calculated increases geometrically, leading to the surge of render time.

Before Editing - Transcode Video for Faster Rendering

1. If possible, shoot video in faster video rendering codec formats. Or transcode video to intermediate codecs like ProRes, DNxHD, DNxHR, CineForm, etc before loading into editors.
2. Record or transcode video in the exact resolution and frame rate that you plan to save even after post production. For example, to make a 4K video for uploading to YouTube, use cameras allowing you to just shoot in 4K. Or both your editor software and CPU/GPU hardware will bear much of the burden of video upscaling or downscaling calculation.



3. Transcode video if things like "HEVC playback error in VLC" or "can't import HEVC in Premiere Pro" happen. HEVC is not as popular as H.264, causing incompatibility issues. Converting HEVC to H.264 is a good way out.
4. Transcode video when your camera compresses video in long GOP, or key-frames won't work properly. The higher the value of GOP, the slower the key-frames seeking is, the longer it takes to import and decode video. As a result, video previewing stutters. When I-frames seeking is not accurate or not working, the video might be full of glitches. Re-encoding video is the fastest way to solve it.

Which software to use for video transcoding?

To re-encode video with codec, resolution, frame rate, GOP, and more parameters adjustments, VideoProc is a good tool to use, for being both easy and fast. The unique Level-3 full GPU acceleration algorithm allows you to maximally benefit from Intel/Nvidia/AMD's hardware. Better still, you can do some simple edits in VideoProc to speed video rendering up even further: cut unwanted clips, trim and merge to rearrange video, add text or watermark, etc. Basic color correction and video stabilization are available as well.

Free Download VideoProc to Transcode Video for Faster Video Rendering!

Before Editing - System Requirements for Faster Rendering

1. Make sure you are rendering on a computer with at least 6 cores and supporting hyper-threading. 8-core processor would be better.
2. GPU renderer would help accelerate both your video rendering for preview and export a lot, especially when there is color correction and you add special effects. Exporting (video encoding) is actually a process of large amount of data calculation, which happens to be what GPU excels in.
3. Better use SSD for faster file reading speed. It won't directly speed up your video rendering, but the whole video editing of large 4K files would be much smoother.
4. A minimum of 16GB of RAM is required for HD video rendering/editing, while 32GB for 4K.

How to enable GPU rendering in Premiere Pro?

To enable GPU rendering in Premiere Pro, the processor or graphics card itself should natively support the hardware acceleration technology. Premiere Pro allows you to use Mercury Playback Engine CUDA and OpenCL for faster video rendering. But when it comes to video encoding, only GPU acceleration powered by Intel QSV is supported. Plug-in is needed for using Nvidia NVENC. Check your hardware information to see if you can maximize the use of your CPU or GPU to render video faster.

During Editing - Faster Render Settings Premiere Pro

1. Use special effects or transitions that supports GPU rendering. You should know that only parts of effects in Premiere Pro can be accelerated in rendering by CUDA.
2. Render video in lower resolution. For example, render in 1/2 or 1/4 in Premiere Pro instead of full size. Other editor software like PowerDirector allows you to preset video rendering resolution, frame rate, etc.

See the following effects in Premiere Pro that supports GPU rendering

Final Word

There might be many more professional tips that can help make your Premiere Pro or After Effects video rendering faster. But those ten suggestions should be able to give you a leg up. Enjoy your video editing!