Smart rendering in Premiere Pro has been available for DV and DVCPro formats for years, but since Premiere Pro CS6 (6.0.1), many more formats have been added. In Premiere Pro CS6 (6.0.1, and later), smart rendering capability has been added for Long GOP MPEG2 OP1a exports, where the original material is a matching long GOP MPEG2 OP1a or XDCAM EX file. The intention is that smart rendering creates better quality output by avoiding recompression when possible. For Premiere Pro CS6 users, to get the full benefit of this feature.

In Premiere Pro CC, additional codecs have been added for smart rendering (scroll down for details). • AVC-Intra in MXF (located in Format > MXF OP1a) • DNxHD in MXF (located in Format > DNxHD MXF OP1a) • DNxHD in QuickTime • ProRes in QuickTime • Animation in QuickTime Premiere Pro engineer, Wil Renczes, explains how smart rendering works in Premiere Pro CS6 (6.0.1, and later): What is it? (probably obvious, but I’ll start at the beginning): The feature is specifically for accelerating render times for long GOP MPEG2 and essences and certain QuickTime codecs (in Premiere Pro CC), while avoiding recompression. Which new formats are now accelerated? Source media that is either XDCAM HD in an MXF wrapper (ie 4:2:0 XDCAM HD @ 18/25/35 mbits/second, or 4:2:2 XDCAM HD @ 50 mbits/sec.), or XDCAM EX (.mp4 wrapper within a BPAV folder structure, 18/35 mbits/second). Scroll down for formats introduced in Premiere Pro CC. What do I have to do for it to work? Nothing for DV or DVCPro formats, smart rendering automatically engages.

Internal Recoding up to 180fps in HD will offering nice SlowMotion effects for Commercials. The RCP and CC-filters can compensate for different lighting conditions. Very compact and portable Multicam control switcher. Auto greeting software for paltalk messenger. Transcode the XAVC HD file to XDCAM® MPEG (50 Mbps/422) MXF files or Avid DNxHD®.

For XDCAM formats, check the checkbox for smart rendering in the XDCAM exporter plug-in. If you have these types of clips in your timeline in a sequence with matching settings, are exporting out to MXF OP1a with a matching preset, and the checkbox is checked in the XDCAM exporter plug-in, it’ll engage.

It’ll also figure out if there’s any effects applied and fall back to regular rendering if needed. Can I turn it off? Uncheck the checkbox in the XDCAM exporter plug-in. How do I know it’s working? Excellent question. Since it’s supposed to work seamlessly, there are no hints in the UI as to what’s going on. As an engineer, we can check out conflicts in a debug console window.

If there are any mismatches, then smart rendering won’t occur. Unfortunately for the user, there is no way to test if smart rendering is working other than noting an accelerated workflow, and less generational loss. What kind of acceleration are we talking about exactly? Well, the idea is that for untouched clips, recompressing frames is probably going to take longer than simply copying the data directly from the source clip. Now, it’s not quite as simple as that, as if you have edit points that don’t land on I frame boundaries, then there’s some partial GOP ’healing’ that needs to happen, but we don’t need to get into the nitty gritty here. Anyway, provided you have good disk i/o, the render numbers are a fair bit better. Testing indicates that the render numbers are anywhere from 4x to 12x faster than realtime.

On my own benchmarks (off a single drive, SATA 3 mind you, but still), a regular render of XDCAM HD 4:2:2 at 50 mbits is usually 2x realtime. With smart rendering enabled, the same clip now renders at 6x faster. Not too shabby.

And, the lower the bitrate, the faster it renders (less data per frame to copy, so it can do more at the same transfer speed). Okay, I’m trying to smart render an XDCAM EX clip out to OP1A, and why isn’t it smart rendering? This is probably the trap that most people will fall into when trying it for the first time. For example, if I pick an EX clip, 35 mbits/sec, shot at 24fps. Then, I drop it into a matching sequence, pick the XDCAM HD 1080 35 NTSC 24p preset, and hit render. However, if I check it on the console, I see errors. Why the heck is that?