Known Participant

Question

Flickering and poor quality output from CC2019 and CC2018

Forum|Forum|6 years ago
April 24, 2019
3 replies
3466 views

OK. This is going to be a little long so bear with me as I try to get all the facts out there so there is a clear picture of what is going on.

I am a professional video editor and shoot and have been using Adobe Products for 20 years. I edit on a high end Windows 10 workstation and do not use any Macs.One of my responsibilities is to film live stage performances at our local university for archival and theater use. I have a Canon C100 and Canon XL-H1 that I still use as it has great zoom range for closeups on live performances. I record footage from both camera to external Atmos recorders in ProRes HQ for the actual editing source material.

I take this footage and import it into Premiere Pro, Color Correct and do some A/B creative editing between wides and closups. I render to H.264 .mp4 for local storage as well as h.264 for Bluray, and mpeg2 for DVD versions. It has always worked perfect and the resulting footage was very clean and impressive to see. I have done this in various versions of CC through the years and the issue I am about to describe just started.

I started this latest project 1 month ago on CC2019. I imported all of the ProRes footage and laid out a 1920x1080 timeline. I proceeded to do a edit a 2 hour project to it's completion. The project in question is admittedly a little darker than usual as this stage play used lower key lighting. But previewing it while I edit on a calibrated HD monitor looks really good.

Now when I export to h.264 at 25mbps (always use this and it looks great) I am experiencing very bad encoding issues. The first think you notice upon viewing is that before the lights come up the dark auditorium is extra noisy and there is a pulsating or flickering quality to the video....as if the black levels are jumping up and down rapidly. My wife says it looks like lightning flashes (though not that bright). During dissolves it breaks up worse than normal. When we cut to the closeups and the lighting comes up the actors and the stage that is lit looks decent but everywhere that is even remotely dark is still riddled with blocks and flickering. It really looks unacceptable. In comparison, my previous projects I checked show no blocking in the darker areas....or at least it is so minimal as to not be noticeable at a normal viewing angle. Also no flickering either.

Now having a background in IT, I am excellent troubleshooter so I have tried a number of things with no good answers. I have moved the project to a completely different computer and rendered with the same results. I have outputted to ProRes HQ with the same issues. I have output to DNX with same issues. I do not know what is causing this. I even created a new empty project, brought in a single clip and exported and the problem still exists so it is likely not a corrupt project. The interesting thing is I took that same single clip and imported into Premiere CC 2015 and exported it and it looks beautiful. Amazing. Now I am more confused.

As a last ditch effort to get this project output so I can actually deliver it (keep in mind the actual project looks great on the timeline still) I modifed the prproj file using am xml editor so that I could open it in Premiere CC 2018 and hopefully output it successfully. While I am able to open the project and actually edit, the results of the output file are the same. Flickering and poor compression. I proceeded to modify the .prproj file again and was able to open it in CC 2015 albeit there are a ton of issues as audio filters and lumetri are massively different so I would have to do major work to get it back to a fully edited state. I did however export a small segment and it seems to look really good from there. So CC2015 is outputting properly.

So.....I've spent the better part of 48 hours trying to get my 2 hour complex edit out of Adobe Premiere without the export process screwing up the quality so bad that clients will complain. I know that h.264 will not look as good as ProRes but honestly it still looks darn good at higher bitrates. Anyone have any ideas? It seems like something about the export from CC 2019 (and maybe 2018) mucks up the video and it's putting me in hot water with the university as they want this latest project delivered this week.

Help!!!!!

This topic has been closed for replies.

Averdahl

Community Expert

Now when I export to h.264 at 25mbps (always use this and it looks great) I am experiencing very bad encoding issues.

There has been several complains about the built in H.264 encoder for a while now. Fine details, grass, water, tree tops, etc, etc are being treated really bad.

Try the free trial of TMPGEnc Movie Plug-in AVC for Premiere Pro. I use it myself since i gave up and this encoder outperforms the one shipped with Adobe products. The trial has no limitations so it is worth trying. Exports is done directly from the timeline or via Adobe Media Encoder.

And, do you get the same results if you go to File > Project Settings > General and set the Renderer to "Mercury Playback Engine Software Only"?

I

icicle22Author

Known Participant

I have the latest drivers from Nvida as CC2019 came right out and told me I had to.

I've also tried both Mercury Hardware and Mercury Software when outputting with same results.

Averdahl

Community Expert

...when outputting with same results.

O.k, did you try TMPGEnc Movie Plug-in AVC for Premiere Pro?

C

Carlos Ziade

Community Expert

might not be a solution, but a suggestion in addition to all above:

Premiere Pro 2019 requires in most cases that you update your graphics card driver from the manufacturer's site,

can you confirm that you did that?

Christian.Z

Community Expert

Hey there,

Got a few questions to be able to better understand and help. However, if you are really pressed, try using this to downgrade to CC2015: Premiere Project Downgrader - Free prproj Version Convert Might work better than xml.

1- Are you using any type of effects besides Lumetri? If you are, please provide more details.2- Are you rendering your timeline or directly exporting? Does rendering the timeline produce the same issue as exporting?

3- Have you tried both Software only and GPU acceleration as renderer in the project settings?

4- Have you tried checking "Render at maximum export settings" in the export dialogue?

5- Have you tried both Hardware and Software encoding under "Encoding settings" in the Export dialogue?

6- Are you exporting using AME or PP? have you tried the other way?

7- Finally, my biggest suspicion is that there is something happening wrong with Lumetri (If that's what you are using for color grading). Can you please try exporting WITHOUT any color grading

Finally, can you please post a video or screenshots showing the following:
1- Source footage quality vs export quality2- export setting
3- sequence settings
4- project settings

5- comprehensive lumetri/effects workflow.

6- effects panel

7- timeline

8- anything else you think can help.

I

icicle22Author

Known Participant

1- Are you using any type of effects besides Lumetri? If you are, please provide more details.

Only Lumetri for color correcting. No other effects.

2- Are you rendering your timeline or directly exporting? Does rendering the timeline produce the same issue as exporting?

Exporting directly and sending it to media encoder. Same results

3- Have you tried both Software only and GPU acceleration as renderer in the project settings?

Both. Same results.

4- Have you tried checking "Render at maximum export settings" in the export dialogue?

Yes. Same outcome.

5- Have you tried both Hardware and Software encoding under "Encoding settings" in the Export dialogue?

I cannot choose hardware as it is greyed out. I don;t think I have supported hardware to choose this option.

6- Are you exporting using AME or PP? have you tried the other way?

Tried both. Same

7- Finally, my biggest suspicion is that there is something happening wrong with Lumetri (If that's what you are using for color grading). Can you please try exporting WITHOUT any color grading

I will give this a try but I think in my brief tests the issues seem to be gone/or not visible with no Lumetri applied. However the footage is shot on a C100 in Cinema mode which gives it a really flat exposure and the black levels are really high. I figure the issue wasn't as apparent since there were no true dark areas in the video to flicker or get particularly noisy.

I'll try to answer some of the other questions and post some footage but to be clear....the issues I am seeing when viewing on TVs is not readily apparent on the computer. Each time I think I have it resolved by previewing it in VLC or Media Player on my computer screen or to connected monitor, I then view it on a full size TV and it looks horrid.

To be clear I have tested it on several tvs using multiple media players and the results are always the same.

Thanks for any help.

I

icicle22Author

Known Participant

I have it connected live to a TV monitor and from the timeline it looks amazing! When you talk about rendering on the timeline are you basically saying build previews? Not sure what you are asking here.

Yes, that's exactly what I meant. The reason why I want to know this, is that if building previews recreates the issue, it can saves a lot of time with the troubleshooting process versus exporting

I am feeling more and more that the culprit is within Lumetri, maybe the combination between the LUT and some of the settings. The trick is to take it step by step and render/export every time until the issue appears. However, my guts now are taking to what I said before, the combination of LUT with other setting. Try to remove the LUT and keep other settings intact and export

"I am feeling more and more that the culprit is within Lumetri, maybe the combination between the LUT and some of the settings. The trick is to take it step by step and render/export every time until the issue appears. However, my guts now are taking to what I said before, the combination of LUT with other setting. Try to remove the LUT and keep other settings intact and export"

I am not using a LUT in the normal process of editing. I simply open Lumetri and tweak some black levels and tweak the color balance a little. Not LUT at all. I only used the LUT when I was testing source footage in AME to see if the flickering would return. In AME there is a Lumetri option under effects. This only allows you to select presets and you cannot tweak anything here. It's from this test that I determined that the flickering was gone even with a LUT applied. I guess I should try a simple clip in Premiere and only apply a LUT and see if the flickering appears. The hard part is you just plain can't see the issue until render out to a new file and test on a media player.

Sign up

To post, reply, or follow discussions, please sign in with your Adobe ID.

Sign in to Adobe Community

To post, reply, or follow discussions, please sign in with your Adobe ID.

Scanning file for viruses.

This file cannot be downloaded