How To Render In Premiere Pro: 6 Ways To Speed Up Rendering

You’ve finished the latest cut in Premiere Pro, and you’re stoked to have a preview, but then you see the dreaded percentage bar and the time it’ll take to render in Premiere Pro. Livid is an understatement. So let’s jump into how to render in Premiere Pro.

Well, there are many ways to render your projects in super quick time in Premiere Pro, and we’re going to lay those out for you from the offset.

A lot you may not have heard of before, but fear not, filmmakers, we’ve added a couple of instructions to ensure your render times in Premiere Pro are obliterated.

Here’s how you can render faster in Premiere Pro today; let’s check these tips out below!

Here’s How You Can Render Faster in Premiere Pro

Let’s get into the meaty stuff and look at the top tips to ensure you render faster in Premiere Pro. From clearing your media cache to increasing your memory allocation, these simple tips will boost the rendering time in Adobe Premiere Pro in an instant.

Let’s check them out.

Increase your memory allocation

Increasing your memory allocation will help you speed up the render process in Adobe Premiere Pro.

Allowing more memory allocation is simply giving Premiere Pro access to more of the memory on your computer and reducing the amount other programs use.

One tip, ensure that your other programs don’t suffer if you’re running on limited memory. But, if you have a boatload, assign a lot more to Premiere Pro.

To increase your memory allocation, simply click Premiere Pro > Preferences > Memory.

Clear your media cache

Firstly to ensure you are rendering in Premiere Pro to the optimum possible speed, make sure you clear your media cache.

Every time you add or import a new file into Premiere Pro, new media cache files are created. After a while, these add up and slowly reduce the amount of space you have on your hard drive, therefore slowing your computer system right down.

To optimize Premiere Pro and clear the cache, simply click Premiere Pro > Preferences > Media Cache > Browse. 

When you select “Browse”, you can reallocate the media cache to an external drive; this will help improve the speed of your render in Premiere Pro immediately.

Adjust your playback settings

Yep, as simple as that. Adjust your playback settings to a lot less than you currently have it set to. Maybe try ¼ or and ⅛ – this will immediately increase the rendering speed and allow you to watch back your latest edit quickly, smoothly and efficiently.

Yep we know the quality won’t be as high, but this will not affect the export quality; it’s simply a playback feature.

To reduce this, you can locate the playback settings in the bottom right-hand corner of the playback window (See below).

When editing, use proxies

When you start editing in Premiere Pro, you probably won’t be editing using proxies. Proxies are basically an offline intermediary that you can edit from.

It is essentially a secondary source where you edit from allowing you to edit different parts of your project from another source.

By editing with a proxy, you’ll increase the speed of the render and playback immediately. Proxies are also relatively easy to set up.

Here’s how to set up a proxy for your next Premiere Pro project.

Go to the Project Panel and then select the media/videos you wish to create proxies.

Right-click on the selected media.

Now, in the context menu, select Proxy > Create Proxies.

Now select the Format Box. Two options will pop up H.264 and Quicktime. These are the two options for editing using proxies; decide which one you want to use and select it.

You’ll then be able to edit via a proxy, ensuring your rendering times are dramatically reduced.

Switch the GPU acceleration on

Switch the GPU acceleration on to see an immediate increase in speed and efficiency. The speed of your computer correlates with the speed of your render in Premiere Pro, so you want this as speedy as possible. 

To find this feature in Premiere Pro, simply select File > Project Settings > General.

Then underneath the “Video Rendering and Playback,” go to the “Renderer” dropdown. In this menu, make sure to click the “Mercury Playback Engine GPU Acceleration.”

Render and replace

If you have any imagery or text dynamically linked from After Effects, make sure to use the “Render and Replace” functionality. It will reduce the time of your render and speed up the playback immensely. 

To locate the “Render and Replace” functionality, simply right-click on your dynamically linked comp and select “Render and Replace”.

Yep, it’s as simple as that!

How Do I Render a Clip in Premiere Pro?

If you simply want to render a selection of your video while still working in Adobe Premiere timeline – select the clip in your timeline and then press the enter key on your keyboard. This will render your clip!

Watch this quick video to see how this is done.

We hope this article on 6 ways to immediately speed up your RENDER in Premiere Pro was helpful to you. Please let us know your thoughts in the comments down below.

Jay Neill

Jay Neill is the founder and managing editor of iFILMthings and believes everyone should have access to the film resources they need to plan their filmmaking project, which is why he’s dedicated iFILMthings to helping all filmmakers.

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