Now in Beta: Improvements to ProRes Playback Quality

Today’s Premiere Pro Beta build introduces both a bug fix and a slight change in functionality to improve the playback experience with ProRes media. 

The Problem 

Premiere Pro was not displaying ProRes media at the proper bit depth on Apple silicon systems when hardware decoding was enabled. Rather than playing back at the expected bit depth of 32-bit float, they would play back at 8-bit which would produce banding artifacts on playback and export. That bug has been addressed starting with Premiere Pro Beta build 23.3.0.18.  

Updated Functionality 

There are several settings that go in to determining the performance and playback quality of media in Premiere Pro. Two of the most important settings are High Quality Playback and Maximum Bit Depth.   

High Quality Playback  

This setting can be found in the context menu of both the Source and Program Monitor. Enabling this setting allows for a better quality image on playback under some scenarios. However, this increase in quality can also come at a cost to performance.   

Maximum Bit Depth  

This setting is found by selecting a sequence and going to the Sequence menu and selecting Sequence Settings. Enabling this setting tells Premiere to render the video using the maximum bit depth possible. Different formats have different bit depth options for their render quality and enabling this setting ensures Premiere will use the highest quality option. However, like the High Quality Playback setting, this comes at a cost to performance.   

Together these two settings, when enabled, allowed Premiere to play ProRes media at its full potential.   

The biggest change with this update was to decouple the High Quality Playback and Maximum Bit Depth settings. Now, only the High Quality Playback setting needs to be enabled to play ProRes media at 32-bit float. This also means the Source Monitor can play media in 32-bit float where this was previously not possible.   

Note: These changes to our playback settings are specific to Apple ProRes in a QuickTime or MXF wrapper. No other format has been affected.  

This doesn’t mean that the Maximum Bit Depth no longer serves a purpose. There are still times when it makes sense to enable it:   

Balancing quality and performance  

Enabling Maximum Bit Depth but disabling High Quality Playback will play back ProRes media at 10-bit allowing for more performant playback with little to no drop in quality.   

Working with non-ProRes media   

These settings changes are specific to Apple ProRes. For any other media the High Quality Playback and the Maximum Bit Depth settings will still be required to take full advantage of the full bit depth available.