Enable Additional Hardware Accelerated Decoding Support for H.264 and HEVC Footage

Adobe cannot overcome HW limitations. Both Nvidia and AMD do not support any 422 encoding/decoding and the support Premiere will have for 422 is for Apple's M chip based machines and for Intel's QuickSync.

Why doesn't Nvidia or AMD supports 422? it's not a HW issue, IIRC it's more of "blame the MPEG LA greedy requirements" issue..

Hi everyone! Gonna revive the thread over here with a little update I noticed.

In the Premiere Pro Beta v24.6, I saw this change regarding more hardware acceleration support for H.264 and HEVC media files.

If this is what I believe it is, then Premiere Pro may possibly now have hardware acceleration for 8-bit 422 and 10-bit 420 footage in the H.264 and HEVC codecs. That means much smoother playback!

The only part that kind of throws me off is the word "streams". I hope I'm not misinterpreting anything but feel free to clarify if I am.

In other words, since this post I did learn more about what works best for editing in Premiere when recording in H.264 with OBS Studio.

I learned that the NV12 color format is hardware accelerated so that's what allows Premiere to play back H.264 files a lot more smoothly than other footage recorded in H.264 (playback quality is actually quite similar to ProRes playback).

Overall though, I'm curious to hear other people's takes on this update change in the Premiere Pro Beta v24.6. Feel free to share!

@Mike McCarthy I have, actually! I've worked on projects, recording in both HEVC 4:4:4 and HEVC 4:2:0 in 8-bit MOV and MP4. I tend to interchange between these two depending on the project.

Thankfully, the quality difference on my end isn't super substantial but that's mainly because I don't push my color grades that much, knowing the limits of the 8-bit and chroma subsampling.

In the Unity engine, I do record with the image having an HLG-like color profile to preserve some of the detail in the shadows and highlights. This does, in fact, help a good bit when in the postproduction phase.

Even though my case is centered around a virtual production, I feel the same should be considered for live-action productions as most creative professionals are recording in at least 10-bit 4:2:2 or higher.

If I do push the color grades for HEVC 4:2:0, then that's when I tend to notice the blocky artefacting and noise in the colors.

With HEVC 4:4:4 footage, I am able to push the grade more without introducing artefacting and noise by a modest amount.

So overall, there is a quality difference that you can notice if you really look for it and push it. Since this is CG footage, perhaps it may be more forgiving on the quality side of things when recording to a compressed codec.

In OBS, unfortunately there aren't any options that allow for 4:2:2 that's possible at the moment (there is the P216 color format, but that is 16-bit 4:2:2 and there is no way to record that with H.264 or HEVC at the moment).

Interestingly enough, the same playback issue does happen with HEVC 4:2:0. I talk more in detail about it in the post mentioned above but I'll put it here for convenience (I have it marked as the correct answer.):

https://community.adobe.com/t5/premiere-pro-bugs/hevc-8-bit-4-4-4-footage-is-very-hard-to-playback-in-premiere-pro-sometimes/idi-p/14229324

Long story short, I don't really have a good answer as to why it also happens with HEVC 4:2:0 other than that maybe Microsoft's HEVC extension is buggy.

I was trying to avoid H.264 due to quality concerns, but worst case scenario, I may have to suck it up and use that codec if it really comes down to it and use a high enough bitrate to still get a clean image.

Recording in 4:4:4 has been mainly to preserve as much detail as I can when in the posproduction phase before outputting as 4:2:0. For me, it gives a bit more flexibility; but I do sometimes use 4:2:0 for quick turnaround projects.

I guess what I could do instead is proxy to H.264 instead of ProRes so that I save a bit more on storage with the added benefit of hardware acceleration for H.264 in 4:2:0. That's a possibility.

But basically, I have tested and compared between 4:4:4 and 4:2:0 for HEVC.

Thanks for pitching in!

@Mike McCarthy hi.

Try to color the material 4:2:0 and 4:2:2. I'm not talking about 4:4:4. And see the result. I think you'll understand what I'm talking about here. The quality of work with the source and its flexibility in postprocessing are important to me.

Have you done a comparison of recording HEVC 4:2:0 versus 4:4:4 for your workflow?  If you don't need to color correct (tune your image in the software before recording it, that is one of the benefits of virtual production) and your output is 4:2:0 (anything going to the web) then maybe HEVC 4:2:0 might be ideal for your unique workflow.  And it would be accelerated in PPro.  Or you could proxy to 4:2:0 if you want to improve performance, the files are small.

Agreed, I would want Nvidia to up their format support especially long-GOP.

But ... there's such a mish-mash between AMD and Nvidia and now ARC ... each has tempting capabilities for this and that, but not this other thing. I would, as a user, want them all to support a wider range of user activity.

@R Neil Haugen I'm glad to hear from you, my friend.

Yes, I would really like to have such support on board NVIDIA. I haven't updated my processor yet, but Jensen Huang donated a lot of money to purchase the RTX 4090. You can congratulate me))) But, I would experience more joy with 4:2:2 support on a video card than on a processor. On the contrary, I believe that NVidia should have such support, despite the fact that the latest generation of processors support such performance, so that the user should choose in priority and capabilities what works best for him or what he currently has, the old i9900K processor (by the way, I have one on board now) or use the second tool is the RTX 4090. I think this is indicative and it would be right to give the user a choice depending on his capabilities. As for AMD, I can't say anything, since I don't use it.

Hey, Baffy!

Yea, that choice by both Nvidia and AMD to not support 422 is both odd and absolutely infuriating.

At least, with Nvidia, they could claim that since Intel can do this on the mobo, maybe they don't have to. But a lot of us run AMD CPUs and Nvidia GPUs. 

For AMD ... I mean, really, what the hay?

I am very upset. Sorry, sorry, sorry. But is there really no solution and why are Nvidia and AMD developers not implementing the most popular 4:2:2 for today? I assure you it will remain the most in demand for many more years.

I'm sorry to state this, but this decision not to support 4:2:2 is the decision of both AMD and Nvidia themselves. Adobe and all other NLE makers are left holding the bag, in this case. Even DaVinci Resolve does not support 4:2:2 hardware decoding at all with anything other than an Intel GPU because Blackmagic cannot circumvent the dictatorial policies of both GPU makers.