Support AV1 Video Encoding and Decoding

Forum|Forum|8 years ago
April 4, 2018
225 replies
81547 views

AV1 has been becoming a more and more popular codec for not just streamers, but also content creators and filmmakers. Video hosting platforms, such as YouTube, are now implementing AV1 as a way to easily stream video content to audiences at lower bandwidths. Filmmakers, and especially content creators, are asking for AV1 for creating high quality content without too much compromise for file sizes and ease of use when viewing.

Having the benefit of AV1 video will help with preserving the best image quality at a much smaller and efficient file size than codecs like H.264. HEVC/H.265 is supported in Premiere Pro and it's a very nice codec. In fact, both HEVC and AV1 perform very similarly. However, it would be wonderful to have the flexibility of additional codecs that are gaining traction in modern media.

HEVC isn't supported everywhere, largely due to their licensing slowing down adoption. Meanwhile, AV1 is open source, so it would be easier to adopt without the concern for licensing; thus, making it more popular with platforms than HEVC.

Competing video editing platforms have also supported AV1 encoding and decoding for some time and I have been wanting Adobe to look into it for a while.

Overall, I highly recommend Adobe include AV1 encoding and decoding support for Premiere Pro. I strongly believe it will heavily encourage more people to create the best content with a codec that is extremely efficient as it is excellent at preserving image quality.

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Lateralus99

Participating Frequently

I would like AV1 support for the size and quality benefits. This would be for long term storage. It saves on hard drive space. I want to be able to convert my videos to av1 and export them.

Fergus H

Community Manager

@Raphael297215156mgc Thanks for the extra info!

I suspect what you might have been seeing is the availability of hardware acceleration for H.264 and HEVC varies, based upon the bit depth and chroma subsampling of the media and whether it is also supported in the editing software. I'm not as familar with AV1 in this regard ('though I've just asked my colleages at NVIDIA for more info) but perhaps it's simpler.

While it doesn't cover AV1, as a Resolve user, you might find this article interesting: https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/what-h-264-and-h-265-hardware-decoding-is-supported-in-davinci-resolve-studio-2122.

Regards,

Fergus

R Neil Haugen

Legend

That is a very useful post, Raphael. Enough details to be informative, succinctly stated.

Everyone's mileage always varies ...

R

Raphael297215156mgc

Participating Frequently

@Fergus H

I appreciate the attention, sir! What i meant by smoother is in comparison with H265 and H264 on Davinci Resolve (since it's not possible to test on Premiere). I record using OBS, MP4, around 45k bitrate for h264, 35k for h265 and 20k for AV1. Whenever I try to edit any of those recordings with compatible software is really noticeable that AV1 make the software more responsive. For example:

Editing 2h long stream -> need to go from minute 10 to minute 90 -> With AV1 is basically instant. Otherwise takes a few seconds to load.

I'm using a RTX 4080, R7 5800X, 32GB RAM and 7gbps nvme ssd.

B

bethuel1994

Participant

WHAT THIS GUY SAID ☝️

Fergus H

Community Manager

@Raphael297215156mgc thanks for the feedback. I hear you're frustrated about the lack of AV1 support so I appreciate even more that you took the time to provide some details. The benefits you're describe are definitely ones we are aware of but your detail (particularly your 3rd point) is helpful.

Can you provide some more information on this point?
"Editing with AV1 files is a lot smoother" - A lot smoother than what format? Most formats that Premiere Pro supports are hardware accelerated so I'm curious to hear your experience. FYI, we recently added in beta support for the 10-bit 4:2:2 decode support that NVIDIA now provides in their Blackwell Architecture GPUs.

Regards,

Fergus