Why frameserve from timeline in Premiere 6.0?

[q1aqza]

What are the advantages in doing this?

I tried this for the first time at the weekend and I found it very slow. My perception is that the only advantage is that you save on disk space by not exporting to a DV AVI file first or if you only do 1-pass encodes. Considering so many people on this site are doing it I must be missing the point somewhere !!.

Here's what I tried:
1. A straight frameserve using the Video Tools AVI Wrapper to CCE 2.50 from an unchanged DV AVI (followed the Video Tools guide). This ran approximately one third slower than an AVISynth->CCE frameserve directly from a DV AVI file, on a 3-pass VBR this equates to being 100% longer in overall duration - ok take back a third or so of that to allow for the time to export to AVI file, you still have approx. two thirds longer.

2. When I applied some cuts and transitions (without rendering them) the frameserving ran about two thirds slower than a DV AVI file->AVISynth->CCE encode. I expected it to be slower on the first pass as I assumed the first pass applied the rendering, however the second and third passes also ran at the same speed, as though it was rendering on each pass - is that right?.

3. I tried the same again but rendered first and this did speed things up a little but it was still not as fast as when there were no cuts/transitions - if it was rendered then I would have expected it to be the same speed as 1. ?

As a newbie to Premiere I would really appreciate some advice and guidance on this.

[Poplar]

The only advantage I can think of is that you can add your own stuff with Premiere: rolling titles, credits, fancy transitions, effetcs, logos, superimposed tracks, etc. If you need only simple cuts and merges, there is no need to use Premiere at all. You can use other faster tools to do that .

But if you need fancy stuff, there is no way to go around. That's what Premiere is for. Premiere's rendering engine is not fast and it can be frustrating in multi-pass situation. Maybe you can export timeline to HuffYUV and do your multi-pass from there. I did it several times with some short clips. It did save some time.

[EricB]

I frameserve from Premiere because I use all the editing features, and then want to use TMPGENc to encode. I save the edited version of the file out to the camcorder, then frameserve to the encoder. On my system, the frameserving to TMPGENc is about as fast as going from an AVI file on the drive. Because I'm still using FAT32, this also allows me to have up to 3 hours of DV video on the timeline and encode to mpeg.

[q1aqza]

Thanks for the replies.

I think this has re-confirmed my initial thoughts. Only worthwhile if you have a disk space/FAT32 limitation, or if you do a 1-pass encode. I have XP Pro and sufficient disk space so I guess I will stick to what I have always done with other editing apps - export to a DV AVI first and then frameserve into CCE using AVISynth.

As my source AVI is DV then I guess I would not lose any quality by exporting to DV AVI rather than use huffyuv.

[vcdfreak]

For me, it saves space and time after editing.

I don't need to wait for export to AVI file. If it's with transitions, it's worse. I can export frames directly to TMPGEnc without sacrificing much performance during encoding.

Secondly, disk space. If I have 2 hours of video, I need to prepare ~36GB of disk space for the AVI file. Don't you think this is a bit too much to reserve for? If you frameserve, you just need to reserve 1GB of disk space (for MPEG-1 file generated by TMPGEnc) if your final video is of VCD format.

[q1aqza]

I rarely edit AVIs bigger than 1 hour but I can see where your coming from when you mention 2 hours so I can appreciate the disk space saving by frameserving.

I would like to know how you are getting speeds close to a direct AVI encode. Do you render first? Are you using the AVI Wrapper or AVISynth to framserve?

I haven't tried frameserving into TMPG from Premiere but on my system, frameserving into CCE directly from a DV AVI using AVISynth I usually get around 0.6-0.7 real time, from Premiere using AVI Wrapper on a non-edited DV AVI I get approx 0.4-0.5 real time, on a rendered DV AVI with transitions and effects I get approx 0.3-0.35 speed and on a non-rendered DV AVI I get approx 0.2-0.25 real time, even less if there are video effects.

On a 3 pass encode of a one hour AVI these performance differences are huge !!

[vcdfreak]

I seldom render my video in Premiere as it takes time and I can frameserve directly without having to render. If you have already rendered the entire footage and the video clip is short, exporting to AVI might not be a bad idea, as the export time might not be long.