Adobe Media Encoder pausing rendering while working in Premiere Pro

[Barre2Faire]

Hello everyone,

So I am redering a video in Adobe Media Encoder and at the same time I am editing a new one in Premiere Pro.

I noticed that AME is constantly pausing the rendering and did not know why. It turns out that while I'm editing a video in Premiere Pro, I am constantly pressing the space bar to start/pause the video I'm editing. While I do that, AME keeps pausing/unpausing the rendering. Somehow, pressing the space bar in PP has an effect in AME.

I have no clue why it does that because the Premiere Pro window has the focus, not the AME one.

Has anyone ever seen that?

I use Windows 8 and Adobe CC.

[Rallymax-forum]

That is as designed.

There is a feature request to have them run concurrently but there are major technical hurdles.

[dsfsdsdfsdffdsf]

Argh, that 'feature' is soo annoying! Given one can simply unpause the AME render WHILST playing the Premiere timeline without issue I'm not sure what the technical hurdles are exactly, but I'd love it to be addressed. Most of us are using CPU's and HDD's that sit underutilised a lot of the time. When cutting and encoding longform jobs it's particularly annoying since I usually end up just tabbing constantly between the two programs to keep them both working when I know they can coexist perfectly happily together..

Now cutting in Premiere whilst After Effects is rendering is another story..

[GraphiteGal636]

This was a feature that I hoped would be addressed in CC.  Sadly it hasn't so I guess we will have to put up with it. 

As you say PaulM, I am not sure why this cannot be changed.  I suspect something within the Dynamic Link Server gets confused as to where the space command is being sent.  I have noticed that the behaviour doesn't seem to happen straightaway, or not on my system anyway.  It usually manifests within an hour of working within it and then happens constantly.

Oh well, hopefully it will  be sorted out at a later date.

[jthebes]

You say your CPU/HDDs are underutilized - I find that hard to believe while encoding. Does encoding only use 10% of your cpu resources and not touch your GPU at all?  What are your system specs?  I'm fairly certain that most people would not expect to be able to work on much while encoding since it typically consumes a lot of system resources to get the job done.

For example...at work my workstation is an i7 2600k (4core/8thread - 3.4ghz), 16gb ram, 5 seperate hdds and a GTX670.  If I encode (h.264) and try to do anything else on my machine...the other tasks crawl.  Just look at your performance tab in task manager (if on windows) when encoding.

[GraphiteGal636]

Hi jthebes

I have an i7 3930k 3.20Ghz which has 12 cores.  Encoding 2560x1600 HD is utilising between 35 and 40% of overall availability, the task is split with some cores running at 100% and others not.  Also my GPU is a GTX680 with 2GB of memory.

When I am encoding, I can play Mass Effect 3 multiplayer in full resolution and record at 60fps at full size with no impact on performance.  The only time I experience any kind of slow down is when the disk is becoming full but otherwise excellent.

I put my machine about average compared to some of the specs you see available for editing.

[Rallymax-forum]

btw the reason you're not at 100% load is because AME can't render the raw frames fast enough to keep up with the encoder. If you used an encoder like x264pro which has some uber-intestive compression choices for better quality output it would peg to 100% on all cores.

One thing that makes running AME and PPro concurrently difficult is that the CUDA driver from nVidia has a horrible time time slicing the two actions. I'm really surprised that when you're playing ME3 that background AME rendering doesn't make it stutter. That comment is gated on the assumption that you're even using the GPU in AME - which can only happen if you Queue a sequence from PPro and it has resizing and/or filters that have GPU acceleration.

[Jim_Simon]

the assumption that you're even using the GPU in AME - which can only happen if you Queue a sequence from PPro

That's actually been disabled in CC.  No GPU acceleration at all with AME, only via direct Export.

[jasonvp]

Jim Simon wrote:

That's actually been disabled in CC.  No GPU acceleration at all with AME, only via direct Export.

I'm aware of your tests Jim, but my own haven't really born that out.  Unless I'm misunderstanding things.

My usual benchmark is a 20 minute AVCHD video with a second 20 minute AVCHD video PiP'd inside.  The second is scaled down by 50%, horizontally flipped (accelerated), and cropped 33% from the bottom (accelerated).  The entire video is then scaled down to 720p on export to h.264 MP4.

Driving that through CC's AME results in 1/2 real time.  In other words: 10 minutes to do the work.  If I clear everything, disable MPE, and re-export the same exact way, it takes.. a whole lot longer (about 2t, give or take).

Is that because PPro already did the work before AME got its hands on it?  Or is it not that cut and dry that AME isn't accelerated?

[Rallymax-forum]

AME isn't GPU accelerated. - when I say that I mean any FILE that you import into AME that is scaled does not have GPU acceleration to do the rescale and/or cropping.

But if you export a Sequence from PPro to AME then PPro does the rendering of the frame not AME. Thus if you have GPU accelerated Fx in the Sequence that will be accelerated. It's very much like Dynamic Link. Once the raw frame is rendered it is passed uncompressed to AME for encoding.

Another thing that will speed up export is if you use preview files since they are already calculated. This is a big help on 2pass encode - why render the raw frames twice when a preview can be done once and used on both passes?

So, coming full circle, yes it is unfortunate that AME pauses when PPro is playing but that's the design decision that was made to make it so that the majority of users find the PPro interactive experience the same all the time.

[Jim_Simon]

If I disable MPE, and re-export the same exact way, it takes.. a whole lot longer (about 2t, give or take).

Curious.  Perhaps more testing is in order.

[jasonvp]

Jim Simon wrote:

Curious.  Perhaps more testing is in order.

Indeed, and I did just that.  I mispoke (seriously) when I said the software-only MPE took 2t.  It turns out that both exports took less than t, but the hardware-enabled version was still 4 minutes faster.

The footage was 00:20:11 in length.  With the hardware enabled, AME exported it in 00:09:17.  With it disabled, AME exported it in 00:13:19.  So there's still some play w/the hardware there.

[Rallymax-forum]

Jim Simon wrote:

the assumption that you're even using the GPU in AME - which can only happen if you Queue a sequence from PPro

That's actually been disabled in CC.  No GPU acceleration at all with AME, only via direct Export.

Jim is that a known fact confirmed from the Adobe AME team or an assumption you came too based on your experience?

[Jim_Simon]

A conclusion based on testing.  More may be requried.

[GraphiteGal636]

Hi Rallymax,

Yes I do queue footage by having an Autowatch set up on the directories where the video is written to.  I rarely do a direct export unless testing new settings.

Don't take this as gospel but I too had a feeling that GPU acceleration didn't happen with AME, only direct export.  Not sure where that came from, I did watch some of the recent Adobe TV Web Seminar's about new features of CC products etc, so maybe on one of those?

I found this while trying to find out where I had seen it but it is from AMD site not Adobe so whether it's fully 100% correct I dunno:

"

• Adobe Media Encoder
  The Adobe Media Encoder (AME), with support for OpenCL™ and GPU acceleration, automates the production of multiple encoded versions of source files, sequences, and compositions in Premiere Pro CC. With the GPU-accelerated AME and AMD graphics technology, editors can quickly encode projects and output files for virtually any destination. AMD GPUs handle the heavy lifting, freeing the system’s CPU to perform other functions.

I will try the same test as Jason, if I can find any AVHCD video and see what the results are.  Will be interesting.

[dsfsdsdfsdffdsf]

My comments about encoding and playing a timeline at the same time are from my experiences across a number of OSX seats in our office only, so I certainly didn't mean to imply they were universal to all machines and codecs. The fact that some users report no issues and others report stuttered playback at least merits the option of a checkbox to enable concurrent rendering and playback IMO. (Wishlist added)

For the record I can play back a timeline of mixed H264, AVCHD and Prores 422 files stored on a NAS device whilst encoding a 1080P H264 file consisting of a timeline of AE dynamic links. On a quick test this morning I found flawless playback of the AVCHD and Prores media, with the H264 content suffering from some dropped frames. CPU usage was between 20 - 40% during the process. The machine specs are solid but nothing remarkable - 2 x 2.4Ghz Quad Core Xeon, 32 GB RAM, ATI 5770 GPU, read and write to NAS with about 110 Mb/s throughput.

[GraphiteGal636]

I suppose this is part of the problem Paul in that if you think of the combinations of machine hardware, formats etc, especially for Windows based systems it is staggering.  Developer's can only test so many combinations I suppose.

At least you would hope this is something they are working on as several people in the past have requested and you are another so let's hope it is released in a future update and with the CC, we get new updates much more frequently than the old system.

[Alex_-_DV411]

I noticed that AME is constantly pausing the rendering and did not know why. It turns out that while I'm editing a video in Premiere Pro, I am constantly pressing the space bar to start/pause the video I'm editing. While I do that, AME keeps pausing/unpausing the rendering. Somehow, pressing the space bar in PP has an effect in AME.

Wondering if there have been any developments with that. My facility is contemplating switching to Pr (from FCP7) and the ability to export while still editing is a significant factor.

One suggestion is to start AME and then close / reopen Pr. Can anyone confirm this works consistently with no side effects?

Thanks!

[Norma3n]

I stumbled across this thread because right now I'm doing exactly that. Rendering out a sequence in AME and working on another in PP.

I closed PP to one screen and put AME on another to test. Hitting the spacebar on the PP side had no effect on AME. It soldiered through.

However, with both open, AME will just pause for some reason and I'm away from the computer.  I don't know the reason but it doesn't seem to be the spacebar.

These are one hour timelines, effect heavy, so it shows about 5 hours to render so time may be factor. Maybe it just get's bored. Other than that everything working flawlessly, with no mixed codecs though - all ProRes.

Specs - Mac 8 core, 40gb Ram.

[Alex_-_DV411]

Thank you, very helpful. If you have a chance to test that (AME getting bored) on shorter / simpler timelines, that'd be great.

[John21601]

I vote for ANNOYING! But at least now I know what the heck is happening.

[richardh11919878]

Hi - I was having the same trouble with mysterious encoder pausing - Running PP on an iMac with 16gb RAM, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 675MX 1024 MB, 3.4 GHz Intel Core i7 & I had been encoding on AME while editing hour-long projects with no trouble, then this started happening. 

Quitting PP and letting the encoder work, then restarting Premiere seems to work.

[John21601]

It's simpler than that. It's hitting the space bar while you're editing. What I wish they would fix is EVERYTIME an Apple update comes out Cuda drivers get disabled and have to be reinstalled!!!!

Sent from my iPhone

[gepetto77]

Is there a work around for this? I mean, isn't a major benefit of Media Encoder the ability to continue working while exporting? It's impossible to work in premier while using Media encoder if the pause buttons are linked.

[Jim_Simon]

AME uses a lot of system resources.  So does PP.  Adobe correctly assumes that PP is the more important program, that AME should give up the resources it's using so PP can use them when it needs to.

Practically speaking, you can't "work around" limited resources.  Even if you get more resources (better hardware), there is still a finite amount of power available.

Impractically speaking, you could build a "super-computer" with twice the power that either program alone would be capable of using.  That might do the trick.