Adobe Premiere adds NVENC and AMD

Vouk

Many of you use the Voukoder plugin to have NVENC or AMF GPU acceleration available in Premiere and/or Media. The good news is they will support it natively in the next version (tested it with the latest 14.2 beta version). It is even alot faster than Voukoder ever was: 1m50s vs. 3m00s with my test clip. I am glad I could help you out the last 3 years to provide are workaround. Of course I will continue to develop the plugin as it also supports many other codecs and encoders (and containers like MKV).

Oliver M.D

Glad to hear they're finally adding proper NVENC and VCE support after all this time, and that you continue to supporting this plugin.

Might be an obvious question, but how come the speed difference is so stark in your example mentioned?

Slight off topic: This also makes me wonder, what "preset" is premiere's x264 set up comparatively using since that seems rather "slow"?

Vouk

First, their "plugin" has less options and thus they don't have a complex UI and everything.

Second, I guess they are doing all the pixel format conversion on the GPU.

Third, I use FFmpeg internally to have the same interface for all encoders. They have less glue code in between.

Premiere does not use x264, they use the man concept encoders.

avwtp

Even if NVENC/AMD support is going to be "better" (speed doesn't always translate to better) natively, the Adobe Main Concept encoder is nowhere near as good or controllable as x264.

The biggest reason for me to use the native NVENC is to get around the ffmpeg "feature" of limiting video stream to 1 slice (and hence breaking BluRay compatibility for 4.1/4.2 steams).

Oliver M.D

Zitat von Vouk

Third, I use FFmpeg internally to have the same interface for all encoders. They have less glue code in between.

Thought it might be something like that, less overhead 'n all that. Thanks for the heads up.

Off Topic

Zitat von Vouk

Premiere does not use x264, they use the man concept encoders.

Didn't (Sony) Vegas also use MainConcet for mp4 content? Last time I had to use it I remember it being stupidly slow and bad with low bitrates.

Main reason why I changed over to premiere, and cause it had an NVENC plugin available fitting my needs at the time, and now voukoder.

urik

So yesterday for the first time I had a look at a h264 file exported natively with Hardware Encoding (GTX1080Ti).

I think it was the first time I actually examined it, I had it opened in Avidemux to tweak something.

I was surprised to see there's only P-frames (no B-frames), which in itself isn't a big deal, but even worse, there's no additional I-frames insertion on scene changes. With enough bitrate it probably wouldn't matter that much, but still, it's just not effective quality wise to me.

Adobe's software encoder and Voukoder (by default) do add those I-frames.

So essentially Premiere hardware encoding reminds me of Nvidia's Shadowplay screen capture, just with probably higher preset, adjustable bitrate and GOP interval.

Vouk

What about the NVENC hardware encoders in Voukoder?

urik

Zitat von Vouk

What about the NVENC hardware encoders in Voukoder?

Yes, as I've mentioned, Voukoder does add scene cut I frames and B frames (as these settings are on by default in voukoder, along with lookahead).

I was just ranting about Adobe exporter. Perhaps they use a faster preset or don't pass any parameters to nvenc other than target bitrate and GOP interval.

Vouk

That might explain why the Adobe NVENC Exporter is faster than Voukoder.

urik

Zitat von Vouk

That might explain why the Adobe NVENC Exporter is faster than Voukoder.

It's not for me, it's been pretty much the same speed wise.

I actually had some irregularities with Premiere's native nvenc export when it first came out in 14.2 where it would sometime pick QuickSync over Nvidia, but it seems to have been resolved with later updates.

Did you run your tests before you released the 1.4.0 Premiere connector that resolved the speed issue? I've been using vouk 1.1.3 prior to that and then the new one since connector fix came out, for me they're both take same time as Premiere's export. I still use both, v5 normally and v1.1.3 if I need to quickly tweak parameters without digging into ui.

So for me Premiere nvenc export doesn't in any way make voukoder nvenc irrelevant, with all the additional encoder options it has, CQP, + mkv/mov format for non-mp4 spec audio, to name a few.

Vouk

I installed the beta release back then to try it, and I gave it only a quick test with a plain h264 file with no effects and transitions at all. It happened to be faster (both with default settings) than Voukoder on my RTX2080TI. But as I said: It was not a real test.

dr0

It's great that they have finally added (a non-QuickSync) hardware encoding in 14.3. They have also added hardware decoding in a later release, which is also nice.

But still, Voukoder has quite a few advantages over Adobe's solution, that I can name off the top of my head:

1) As was already mentioned, Voukoder is more than just an HWA QuickSync/NVENC/AMF encoder for AVC/HEVC, as it supports many other codecs.

2) As was also already mentioned, it allows for very comprehensive fine-tuning of encoding parameters.

3) It supports older Premiere Pro versions, going all the way back to Creative Suite.

4) It can be used in After Effects directly.

5) It supports various non-Adobe host applications.

Zitat von urik

I think it was the first time I actually examined it, I had it opened in Avidemux to tweak something. I was surprised to see there's only P-frames (no B-frames), which in itself isn't a big deal, but even worse, there's no additional I-frames insertion on scene changes.

Thanks for bringing this up!

I've been using Avidemux on and off for ages, but only now have I realized that it actually has a current frame type indicator, oh well. Now I won't have to create custom AviSynth scripts for AvsP, or set up a separate installation of MPC-HC/BE with ffdshow output module in order to examine a frame-type-structure of a video.

nettoday

Does their NVENC has CQP? B frames? Look aheads? Doubt it but still like to know. If it doesn't It's not a game changer for me.

Their Main Concept H264 is such trash. I don't know it's castrated or something but the results are terrible mush even with 60k bitrate. That's just as high as I've gone to see if this horrible outcome vanishes. It doesn't No reason to test any further. It's clearly all shit.