The CS6 version of Adobe Premiere Pro went a long way towards winning me over after Apple stranded the FCP7 community with the release of FCPX. I still have many, many gripes, including stability concerns in the Mac version, but I believe Premiere is close to being awesome. So it is a shame that it is still missing an important feature: background rendering.
Background rendering could significantly
speed up editing and exporting.
Adobe ambitiously envisions an NLE into which you can dump any format, edit with real time effects previews, and quickly export directly to your delivery format of choice. It’s a worthy goal.
They have made impressive strides in the first area. Being able to skip transcoding and go right to editing is a wondrous thing. They have achieved mixed results in the next area. Clips with effects still require rendering to scrub smoothly and sometimes just to play, particularly at full resolution, unless you have the very latest hardware with a supported GPU.
The last part — exporting — is the problem.
In Final Cut Pro, exporting to ProRes is extremely fast because FCP does not need to re-encode the video. It takes the previously generated ProRes render files and stitches them together with no generational loss. This is sometimes referred to as smart rendering. In Premiere Pro, it doesn’t matter if you’ve already rendered out the entire sequence to ProRes and are exporting to ProRes. It re-encodes the whole thing every time.
If you need to adjust even a single frame of your sequence, you will then need to re-export the entire sequence, no matter what format you choose. For longform projects, this is a major drawback of Premiere Pro.
You can opt to “Use Preview Files” on export, but this is not what FCP switchers might think it is. Media Encoder still re-encodes every frame even if this is checked in almost all instances. It simply uses the previously encoded render files to assist with the processing. There is a generational loss from those preview files, and the speed improvements are marginal.
“Smart rendering” does already exist in Premiere for a small number of codecs, such as DV and DVCPro, but not for ProRes (or DNxHD). A smarter system would indicate when the smart rendering capabilities of “Use Preview Files” are enabled (rarely) and when they are not.
At a basic level, background rendering would allow many Premiere Pro users to work with fewer interruptions. Maybe that’s the down side! In my experience, adjusting clips that have effects applied to them, even simple color corrections, means that I have to wait…and wait…for preview files to render before I can audition a new cut. In the mean time, I am blocked from doing anything else in the application. (If more Mac GPUs were supported, this might be less frustrating.) Until I can preview any sequence full-screen at full-res with multiple effects, rendering will be part of my workflow, and therefore background rendering would be beneficial.
Conforming to a high-quality codec via background rendering might also have the potential to make it easier to get sequences out of Premiere and into outside software such as DaVinci Resolve.
Smart background rendering
The real potential of background rendering, however, lies in combining it with the export process. Let’s call this “smart background rendering.”
If Premiere Pro allowed you to set the preview file format to the export format of your choice, encode as you go via background rendering, and export using a true “Use Preview Files” option, it would save substantial amount of time in the export process, especially when it comes to re-exporting after making adjustments to the sequence.
As one commenter put it in a Creative Cow thread on smart rendering in Premiere, “Being able to render as you go does save a bunch of time when last minute revisions pop up.” For long sequences, the benefit is enormous.
It should be noted that it is already possible to set the preview file format to Apple ProRes. It requires choosing a “Custom” edit mode while setting up a new sequence. (In any other mode, the preview file format selector is grayed out and locked into the lossy MPEG format.)
When I first floated my thoughts on Premiere Pro and background rendering in the Adobe forums, it was met with some resistance from long-time Adobe Premiere Pro users. (No, I didn’t realize such a thing existed either.) Many of them just seemed concerned that Mac OS users were taking over the ship, but I agreed with one point, which was that it should be possible to turn background rendering off. I would suggest making three different options available in the preferences. Rendering should start: automatically (instantly), only through manual initiation, or during idle periods. It should also be possible to batch render sequences in bins.
Those options alone would allow Adobe to improve upon FCPX’s rendering system. There is an opportunity here, however, for Premiere Pro to leapfrog Final Cut Pro’s background rendering capabilities altogether:
Multiple, simultaneous render formats
Media Encoder can already encode in the background by creating a temporary copy of your project file. Imagine if it could go to work on active sequences, as you continue to work, and render into multiple file formats. In most cases, I would set it to ProRes for my master and a flavor of H.264 for web delivery, choosing ProRes as the preview format as well. I dream of completing a project in Premiere and then…well…that’s it. It’s already encoded. Just export at the “speed of save.” Then start your uploads and catch up on some much needed sleep.
If this seems like it would be beyond the power of most systems, FCPX handles a single stream of background rendering fairly smoothly even on somewhat older Macs. If your computer can encode one sequence quietly in the background, then it should be able to handle two (at half the pace), perhaps prioritizing the preview format.
Higher quality previews, faster exports
Adobe Premiere Pro needs background rendering to allow editors to work more quickly and effortlessly from start to finish, and it’s time for Adobe to bite the bullet and accept that there are benefits to a high-quality intermediate codec that can take advantage of smart rendering. If ProRes or DNxHD present licensing problems, Adobe should develop its own standard.
Adobe, this is your chance! By including smart background rendering (in addition to a mere 88 feature requests), you have the power to make us forget that we ever pined for FCP8. We’re counting on Premiere Pro CS6.5 or CS7 to come through before we’re forced take another serious look at FCPX!