Skip to main content
patrickh27764550
Inspiring
October 8, 2022
Question

Should I export my final item to Quicktime or H264

  • October 8, 2022
  • 1 reply
  • 6304 views

I made a few homemade videos while on holiday and edited them with Premiere Pro and After Effects.  I used Media Encoder to to allof the rendering.

 

I used Premier Pro first and rendered that into a Quicktime Movie and them finished it up in After Effects.

 

For Comparison, renvered the final version into both Quicktime and H264.

 

The settings for both Quicktime Renders (After being finished with Premiere Pro and the final item) are the same.  Both used 59.94mps, 1080p, which matched the raw data.  I used the Apple ProRes 422HQ CODEC, which did not allow me to modify the bitrate, so I assume it keeps the original.

 

For the H264 version of the final video, I used the same CODEC, Apple ProRes 422HQ but downgraded the frame rate to 29.97.  I used a 2-pass Bitrate, with the ideal at 10 and the max at 15.

 

The final item is about 8 mins long.  Playing them side-by-side I saw extremely minimal difference.  I paid atttention to the colors and color tones as well as looked for other signs of difference.

 

The file sizes, however, are extremely different.  The H264 version is about 1.5GB and the Quicktime version is about 25GB.

 

Is there a benefit to keping the higher size QT version?  Is there data below the surface that isn't being used but could be, similar to a Raw photo?

 

Here are two screenshots showing the input and outboot settings.

 

This topic has been closed for replies.

1 reply

Community Manager
October 10, 2022

QuickTime ProRes with Quality 100 end up with a Bitrate around 220MBit for Apple ProRes 422HQ. Means compare to 15MBit with H.264 it is a factor of 15 * 1,5GB = 22,5GB. So to really compare this you need to set the Target Bitrate of H.264 to 220Mbit and the filesize should be the same.