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Pieter26501401gh8d
Participating Frequently
October 9, 2022
Answered

Adobe Premiere and Media Encoder exporting black video

  • October 9, 2022
  • 3 replies
  • 5762 views

I'm just trying to export a video clip... it's a ProRes 4444 in my timeline, with the correct sequence settings. I've tried the latest Premiere 2022 and I also downgraded it to the latest version of 15. Both have the same result. This is on a brand new Macbook M1 Max. 

 

I have never seen this problem before. 

This topic has been closed for replies.
Correct answer Michael Grenadier

so problem solved.  Pieter and I spent some time going back and forth trying a bunch of different things.  He finally mentioned that "I can now playback/export properly because I changed the sequence back to 3800x1800 - the problem was that i downscaled the edit to 1920x1080 to accomodate a few clips that are 2k. The rest were "Scale to fit" and that really messed up Premiere. I'll have to come up with some really annoying workaround to fix this but at least I can work in it."  And then I suggested he use "set to frame size" and that solved the problem...    I came up with many useless suggestions before we got to the problem.  This stuff is never simple to solve...  Gotta say Pieter showed great patience in trying all my suggestions and answering my questions... before we found the solution.  

3 replies

M
Community Expert
Michael GrenadierCommunity ExpertCorrect answer
Community Expert
October 11, 2022

so problem solved.  Pieter and I spent some time going back and forth trying a bunch of different things.  He finally mentioned that "I can now playback/export properly because I changed the sequence back to 3800x1800 - the problem was that i downscaled the edit to 1920x1080 to accomodate a few clips that are 2k. The rest were "Scale to fit" and that really messed up Premiere. I'll have to come up with some really annoying workaround to fix this but at least I can work in it."  And then I suggested he use "set to frame size" and that solved the problem...    I came up with many useless suggestions before we got to the problem.  This stuff is never simple to solve...  Gotta say Pieter showed great patience in trying all my suggestions and answering my questions... before we found the solution.  

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Pieter26501401gh8dAuthor
Participating Frequently
October 11, 2022

This is a great cautionary tale about Set to Frame Size vs Scale, which I've been warned about before but forgot. 

 

Thanks for bearing with me and patiently working through everything till we found the simple solution. 

M
Community Expert
Michael GrenadierCommunity Expert
Community Expert
October 11, 2022

well gotta admit I was just guessing...  but guessing works a whole lot of time.  

Here's where I learned why to choose set to frame size...

https://community.adobe.com/t5/premiere-pro/set-to-frame-size-vs-scale-to-frame-size/m-p/9036658#M78100

and looking at all the usual suspects who contributed to this thread makes me laugh... but I don't think that explains why it was causing Pieter's problems...   Maybe someone can explain this setting had the effect it had...

And Pieter, you were great, trying stuff on your own and trying stuff I suggested and answering my questions.  Had a couple of experiences on this forum recently where people clearly got frustrated by my approach...  

    M
    Community Expert
    Michael GrenadierCommunity Expert
    Community Expert
    October 9, 2022

    so do your sequence settings match your clip settings?  By any chance is there an alpha channel (transparency) associated with the clip or sequence?  Prores4444 does support transparency, but I don't think mp4 does (could be wrong on this).

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    Pieter26501401gh8dAuthor
    Participating Frequently
    October 9, 2022

    It's literally just ProRes4444 Quicktime, the most edit friendly, standard video codec there is in the professional world. There's no graphic layer above it. For a program that touts being able to edit any format natively, this isn't great. 

    M
    Community Expert
    Michael GrenadierCommunity Expert
    Community Expert
    October 9, 2022

    sorry, but prores4444 has an option so that areas of the image are transparent when superimposed over other video in premiere or other programs.  This is called an alpha channel and requires millions+ colors.  It's truly an amazing format that plays more efficiently that other previously available workflows.  If you don't know how to handle that, it can cause problems...   Premiere is a professional level program and you need to have a certain level of expertise to use it effectively.   A smarter choice is prores422(hq) if you don't need transparency.  And I think you can also turn off "transparency" when exporting a file as Prores4444.

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    Pieter26501401gh8dAuthor
    Participating Frequently
    October 9, 2022

    I did a test on another older gen machine but the same v of Premiere - it turns out it has the same problem, but the issue is the mp4 compression from the ProRes4444 QT. This is happening on two different laptops so it has to be the source. The thing is that this is just regular ProRes straight from an Alexa, which has all the metadata intact. If I export same as source (matching sequence settings), straight from Premiere, I can then use Media Encoder to make the mp4. It's just an older method of working but I wonder if anyone has run into this issue before with such a user friendly codec?

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