Export causing grayness to appear

[adragon99999]

So I have a 4K video file that I was able to export on youtube at 2160x3840. This worked fine and my colors are as expected.

But for instagram I made the following changes

- rotated 90 degrees so the source video was 3840x2160 for vertical framing

- change target bitrate to 16 mbps (after failing with 4mbps) 

I'm also using a software encoding because for some reason I run into a GPU issue whenever I try hardware encoding. Much longer but at least it worked, at least for youtube. Again, besides the two bullets I've made no changes. The source/output parameters are attached as well as the example between the normal horizontal video that exports just fine (youtube) and the weirdly artifacted/gray frame on the vertical video (instagram).

Any help is much appreciated!

[kglad]

in the future, to find the best place to post your message, use the list here, https://community.adobe.com/

p.s. i don't think the adobe website, and forums in particular, are easy to navigate, so don't spend a lot of time searching that forum list. do your best and we'll move the post if it helps you get responses.

<moved from using the community>

[adragon99999]

appreciate it! first time asking, will direct question as much as possible going forward 🙂 

[kglad]

no problem.  (just to make sure, is premiere pro is the correct forum?)

[adragon99999]

Also wanted to add that in the export preview, I'm not seeing that same grayness in the vertical video. Attached as screenshot. 

[Ann Bens]

Reset your export settings bitrate to a something more reasonable range.

Start with a YT preset and only change the height and width.

[adragon99999]

Okay so exporting to a high bitrate works (tried 50), but that's really fishy to me. I thought 1080P could be at a target bitrate of 8? 

1080p

8 Mbps

12 Mbps

https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/1722171?hl=en#zippy=%2Cbitrate

I think it's because my source is 4K video/sequence that this is happening? Is that true? Any suggestions on trying to get a lower bitrate to work or an explanation on why I need to exceed 15 mbps (because I tried a target bitrate of 15 that did not work)? 

[adragon99999]

What worries me is that I know instagram is going to compress the heck out of my video if I use a high bitrate. I was trying to dodge that if possible. 

[adragon99999]

okay I fixed it. I updated my nvidia gamready driver which was old to a recent version of nvidia studio drive. Then I undid all of my changes related to software encoding. Finally, I exported at 12mbps and it worked great.

Basically the fix sounds like - don't use software encoding

[adragon99999]

So what I did to resolve (not sure what fixed it)

1. update to the latest nvidia studio driver (I had a few months old nvidia game ready driver) 

2. Change project settings to use the CUDA renderer (I was at software renderer previously to fix GPU issues but looks like nvidia upgrade worked)

3.  VBR 1 pass so I can do hardware encoding (if I do 2 passes it forces me to do software encoding) 

So #3 is interesting and directly points at the issue. I'm at the same export settings, same mbps. If I do 2 pass with software it's gray. If I do 1 pass with hardware encoding, it's great. Any idea why

1. 2 pass stops me from doing hardware encoding?

2. why software encoding is doing this to my video?