Enormous Compression Artifacts Issue with Screencasts/Screenrecordings

[christophb]

Hi,

I am exporting a screen recording file and I am getting compression artifacts and duplicate mouse cursors all over the place, sometimes lasting for seconds, mainly when moving around windows (see along sides of the window borders):

I'm using these settings:

Any idea how this can be resolved? I could try various options but it takes quite long to export so this could potentially take a whole day to figure out 🙂 

Thanks, best regards,

Christoph

[basil1891]

Have you used a clip speedup/slowdown via optical flow? I so try 'frame sampling' instead

[christophb]

Thank you for your idea, @basil1891 ! I have used speedup but in different places (not where the artifacts are). Also it seems I have used Frame Sampling, so that couldn't be it. Also the original footage doesn't have any artifacts but it's admittedly quite big (it's a full screen 13 inch retina screen recording). 

What else could it be?

[basil1891]

for troubleshooting I'd run a copy of the project but downscaled to standard 1920x1080, then selected the trouble part of the timeline and exported it in some intermediate codec, like Prores/Cineform/DNxHD. That way you can check two potentional causes: non-std resolution and h264 codec, and in reasonable time.

[christophb]

Thanks, I will try that.

[Michael Grenadier · Accepted solution]

screen recordings are often variable frame rate which can cause issues in Premiere.  use mediainfo to determine whether your source is variable or constant frame rate
https://mediaarea.net/en/MediaInfo/Download
if it's variable use handbrake to convert to constant frame rate
https://handbrake.fr
and here's a tutorial on how to use handbrake
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=34&v=xlvxgVREX-Y

[christophb]

Thanks, I'll have a look. I recorded it with Quicktime. Do you happen to know if Adobe are going to fix those issues?

[christophb]

That seems to have fixed it, thanks so much @Michael Grenadier - further more it has reduced my source screencast from ~850mb down to ~30mb without noticeable loss of quality :party_popper::party_popper: