@David Lawrence

Hi David,

Thanks for the post and interaction. Clearly, there are a bunch of ways that you can answer your question. First, I'd say there are times when you can consider doing a transcode to a common codec on ingest preserving the 'import tax' and perhaps deferring some of your render tax down the road. I would advocate a transcode only if you have a system isn't super beefy and you're shooting something highly temporal like AVCHD, H264 and the like.

I think that distributing the 'render tax' is pretty easy with Premiere Pro because we try to give users a no-need-to-render situation whenever they're editing. There are moving parts to this and a GPU card is pretty important on an effects heavy job, but in principle, that's always our goal.

That pushes most rendering to your 'output tax.' There's no way to get around final deliverables and while Adobe Media Encoder is 64-bit and works in the background, there's still some time involved!

Adobe Premiere Pro and AME do have Smart Rendering for certain codecs, most notably OP1a MXF, but it's not necessarily faster than doing a full render which is what most people want to get out of Smart Rendering. We are looking into what else we can add here for the future.

Todd Kopriva can correct me if I'm wrong here, but you can use Preview files in your final render but you need to check the 'use preview' option in AME
http://help.adobe.com/en_US/premierepro/cs/using/WS1c9bc5c2e465a58a91cf0b10...

Beyond that, just having a good system is really the best approach to improving any render times. I find RAM to be a good 'cure-all' to making things go faster. If you're less than 16GB of RAM on Production Premium CS6, I recommend that you run out and get some more memory!

Hopefully, some of the above makes sense and helps some people. Let me know if you have any other specific questions.

Dennis - Adobe guy