Experimenting with Premiere Pro's underutilized background transcoding feature.

Dominic Natoli
Dec 22, 2018
2 min read

So I was tweaking my settings in Premiere (2018) in my ever ending quest to optimize my low-end system for 4k editing and sharing those results with others. And I came across a feature that I see NO VIDEOS about this (so far) and yet it can make editing so much smoother AND cut export times by half (or even more).

A few months ago I discovered that editing 4k DNxHD instead of using raw R3D camera files made my editing experience so much better, but what I didn't realize until recently that my export times were cut almost in half.

My Computer specs:

Dell Optiplex 7010

CPU: i3 3225

GPU: Nvidia 1050 ti

6GB of RAM

Using a SSD as the boot drive, run Premiere and to save the cache

But using a 7200rpm HDD to save all the project files.

So if you go to where you create proxies in your inject settings, there is now a new option; Transcoding. And when using it (just like creating proxies) Adobe Media Encoder will open and start to convert your imported footage in your selected codec, but something interesting happens. When each piece of footage is done transcoding, it will replace the file in the bins and in the timeline automatically (or what I call "automagiclly"😁).

Knowing that there are many professionals that use Premiere don't always have the time to experiment with things like this. I did the experimenting for you. I transcoded a 5k R3D file to a wide variety of mezzanine codecs using this feature and measure the scrubbing performance, file size and even export times.