Finding the Encoding Bottleneck

[gword256]

Anyone here savvy enough to give a laymen discussion to find out what my (or others) encoding bottleneck may be?



My personal situation is that I have a desktop replacement laptop, now 3-4 years old. Top notch then but obviously not so much now. It is still a good laptop and I have no desire to replace it but upgrades are possible.

When I do encode I typically get CPU usage around 75%. This means, to me, that something else is slowing the encoding down. Hard drive, maybe. Bus speed, memory speed, etc...? How can I find out where the bottle neck is so I can upgrade that part?

Thanks,

 

[ianwood]

Encoding is CPU intensive first, memory intensive second, and disk intensive third. I don't think you have a bottleneck. If you're pegged at 75%, either the encoding software or the OS is limiting CPU utilization.

 

[noiseboy72]

Fast rendering of HD works best if you have a system - both hardware and software, that allows you to use the graphics card to do the render.

My laptop has an NVidia GT850M card and Adobe Premiere Pro. This renders at better than real time in HD - even with a few effects on the graphics card, but is about 4x slower on CPU only (i7 2.5GHz)

 

[gword256]

Encoding is CPU intensive first, memory intensive second, and disk intensive third. I don't think you have a bottleneck. If you're pegged at 75%, either the encoding software or the OS is limiting CPU utilization.

I found some benchmarks available for Premiere and I will give them a try. After reading the instructions it doesn't appear that the method for performing the benchmarks is 100% user friendly but if I get it to successfully work I can report back.

Fast rendering of HD works best if you have a system - both hardware and software, that allows you to use the graphics card to do the render.

My laptop has an NVidia GT850M card and Adobe Premiere Pro. This renders at better than real time in HD - even with a few effects on the graphics card, but is about 4x slower on CPU only (i7 2.5GHz)

I was having a problem with my CUDA initially but resolved that with older drivers. That was a few weeks of troubleshooting where I couldn't find anyone having the same problem. That was a PITA because I knew CUDA would kick it in the figurative @$$. I have a dual 560M and I think part of the problem was from the SLI setting. Still I can't even playback unedited video in Premiere with the 4k resolution (Note: playback is fine in everything else).

But I'm not complaining about that here. I just want a benchmark that says what part of my computer is the bottleneck.

 

[noiseboy72]

Premiere Pro does not play nicely with dual cards and SLi. I found I needed to force it to use 1 card only to get it to work. There is an article kicking around somewhere about it.

 

[gword256]

Premiere Pro does not play nicely with dual cards and SLi. I found I needed to force it to use 1 card only to get it to work. There is an article kicking around somewhere about it.

Yeah, well, I didn't know that. Took me weeks to find out mostly by accident.

 

[gword256]

Premiere editing/rendering will take a huge performance hit if you're using a single drive for everything since you are limited by disk I/O.

https://forums.adobe.com/thread/662972

I have a USB 3.0 drive where I store my raw video files. It tests at the same speed as my C: drive so i've been using it. Seems no playback performance gains using either drive. I think the 4k files just won't play smoothly on my laptop in premiere. I haven't tested a large export to see if there is a performance difference between using the c: for everything versus using the additional USB drive. Still I want to get an SSD if only to get windows to load everything faster.

Good graphic BTW.

I don't think you have a bottleneck. If you're pegged at 75%, either the encoding software or the OS is limiting CPU utilization.

I've read other places that cpu was not 100% utilized because of the encoding software. Though I'm not convinced of the explanations given. I suppose they could setup the encoder to work like that but for what good reason?