Proxy Project Poor Export Quality

Looking through your settings, you've got two things that may not be helping and definitely take more processing time ... Render Max Depth and two-pass render.

Here's one of the clearest explanations of Max Depth I've seen ...

Render at Maximum Depth

This renders content at 32-bit color depth. Very few output formats actually support 32-bit color but processing at this depth can produce better quality for compositing and effects operations before being scaled back to the output format's bit depth. It can reduce or eliminate artifacts and banding in your video but that benefit comes at the cost of an increase in processing time, so only use it when completely necessary.

You may benefit from this option in the following situations:

• Your source media has a higher bit depth than the format you are outputting to
• Your sequence contains heavy compositing or lots of layered effects (particularly 32-bit color effects)
• Your sequence contains very high contrast or very low contrast images (for example subtle gradients)

From the testing I've done, and from others here on the forum ... unless you're coming from a 10-bit source to begin with, or have done a lot of intense color work and/or used blend modes on a number of clips, this option normally doesn't result in any discernible improvement. It does slow down processing. I'd test an export of a short bit with/without, import back into PrPro, and see if you really can see any difference. Probably ... not.

The other is the two-pass rendering, which ... again, is supposed to help with some few little things, and with modern computers, isn't getting you anything on most exports. Except ... extra processing time.

I've done some amount of work with proxies, and I know it's used rather heavily ... and I've not experienced nor heard of anyone with any export issue related to proxy use. There's some parts of this new workflow that haven't been fully featured yet, but exporting is not (as far as we've seen on the forum) an issue.

So yes ... I'd like to see grabs of the artifacts you are getting.

Neil