Export Settings in Premiere

[zacharyc11209566]

Hello all,

I was just wondering what people have found the most success in for exporting their videos in terms of settings.

I shoot with a Sony A7sII, 1920 x 1080p at 23.98fps XAVC S are my typical settings.

I typically upload videos to Instagram, Facebook, or the myportfolio website through Adobe, which I know further compress my video files than I already do in post. What I've been exporting in terms of settings are:

h.264, match the frame rate I film in, PAL Profile High, Level 5.0... Bitrate VBR, 2 pass, target birtate 4, max bitrate 8....

Now everything looks pretty good, but typically it comes out a smidgen less sharp and sometimes looks like I filmed it with a flip phone. I'm not sure if it is my settings, or if its when I upload it to a website and it compresses it even further degrading the quality. But I use the myportfolio.com provided by adobe for my portfolio and kind'v noticed it looks a little weird (Links below).

I'm just curious if anyone has found some better exporting settings to try to squeeze max HD out of every export.

Cheers everyone,

Zach.

Link to portfolio for reference; Zachary Cooper

[jasontcox]

Your bit rate is pretty slow, to be honest. At 1080, your target bit rate should probably be a MINIMUM of 10, if not 20 for 1080p. Honestly, the default H.264 preset called "Match Frame - High Bitrate" works quite well in 90% of scenarios (gives you a 10-12 Mbps range). If that's still not good enough for you, pick the one that reads "HD 1080p 23.976" which bumps the target bit rate to 35, which may be a bit overkill for your media, but try it out if you don't like the first one I mentioned. You probably don't need to sweat the Profile and Level details if you pick one of those presets. Both will definitely get you better quality than you're getting now.

[zacharyc11209566]

Hi Jason,

I thought it was my bitrate, I'm going to play with it a little more. Thank you for the help!!!

[zacharyc11209566]

Out of curiosity, would it be beneficial to send the video after export through encoder?

[jasontcox · Accepted solution]

Noooooooo. haha. If you export from Premiere and then  take THAT exported file and bring it into Media Encoder and export AGAIN, you're just damaging your video more with a second compression! Unless you mean hitting the Queue button in Premiere's Export window to "send" the sequence to Media Encoder... that's fine, but it shouldn't improve your quality since it essentially uses the same presets and export engine as Premiere.

[R Neil Haugen]

Jason's got you covered  ... my one comment is I'd suggest dropping the 2-pass rendering. It doesn't seem to be helpful in that many situations any more, and does take longer for the export. Testing to see if you see any difference would be useful.

The other two settings that "look" like one should choose them, even though they don't help many exports, are "Maximum Quality" and "Max bit depth". Max quality is primarily for having material of different frame-sizes and/or a lot of resizing going on ... heavy resizing, think mixing 6k, 4k, and 1080 and then exporting with some clips 'set to' the 1080 from a higher res, others scaled at various percentages. Bit-depth is useful when doing a lot of heavy colorist work ... Lumetri with presets, LUTs, Looks, and maybe AE comps thrown in.

Both "Max" settings can really help the specific things they're designed for, and for everything else, slow things down ... and can actually induce artifacts. If you don't need them, avoid them.

Neil