I cheated and ended up getting a 15 inch with the i7 (it was $100 more than the price to bump up the 13 inch to i7 and 16 GB. And I got the $30/m deal from Adobe). I have to say, it'd still painfully slow when it comes to rendering 4K videos, even with Premiere Pro on my brand new MBP (though I haven't played around with proxy editing yet). But it works, at least.
Hopefully not days though right? Proxies will not help with export time, they only help with rendering previews during the editing process. In certain circumstances they can actually hurt export times (if you could have made use of smart rendering but didn’t because your were using proxies)
With Premier Pro, as mentioned above, the settings, hardware set up, and workflow you use have a tremendous affect on render time.
What drone do you have? What codec are you using for export?
Use this tool to test the read and write speed of your external drive
Blackmagic Disk Speed Test by Blackmagic Design Inc
Blackmagic Disk Speed Test
If it says that it is acceptable for ProRes 422 2160p then you can use that drive to store your media and then render to your internal drive. This helps substantially with render time in both editing and exporting.
Another MASSIVE way to increase render and export time is to transcode your media before editing. You can use the built in transcoder in the Mac finder to transcode your media files to ProRes before beginning to edit. You can use the Automator utility on Mac to create an “encode folder” script easily. This will transcode any video files moved into this folder into ProRes 422. Put this folder on your external drive(assuming it is fast enough) and then move the media files you want to edit into this folder and let it go to town. It’s surprisingly quick for what it does but can take awhile to do a bunch of video files. Ideally you can let it do this overnight. Note: converting a video file to ProRes will create huge files. Make sure you only do this to video you know you want to use.
A way to speed up this process is to cut your selected video down to only the parts you want to edit using the finders built in “trim tool.” The Trim tool will allow you to remove unwanted parts of a video file without needing to rerender them. You can also split videos if there is a part in the middle you don’t want to use by trimming the original down to the first par you want to use saving that file as a “new file” and then trimming the original again this time keeping only the parts you want from the second file. This will safe time transcoding to ProRes and reduce your ProRes file sizes significantly.
Once you have your ProRes media ready to edit you can adopt a “smart rendering workflow.” Smart Rendering means that the export function will only rerender the parts of your sequence that actually need to be rendered. So if you didn’t end up doing any editing to a certain part of a clip that clip will not need rerender and passed right through during export. Additionally any preview files you created during editing will then be passed through as well because those are already rendered.
Now that will leave you with a ProRes master file you’ll be able to view and if you need to make changes then you haven’t wasted as much time. When you are happy with it you can then transcode it with Adobe Media Encoder to your codec of choice(Note: if you are just uploading to YouTube just upload the ProRes file assuming you have decent internet speed this will allow YouTube to create a better quality processed media files because it won’t need to recompress your already compressed video file.
Which brings me to the last point. Always always always export with Adobe Media Encoder. It is much more capable then the render engine in Premier(maybe that’s the only options these days anyway?) At any rate use Media Encoder and be sure to really pay attention to the options in Media Encoder so that you don’t have it running in circles while rendering your video. I find it always wants to render in some absurd codec if I let it do the default option it want to give me.
This is a good article about some of these things I’ve touched on and more
https://forums.adobe.com/thread/2122549