Premiere 25.5.0: app.encoder export methods don't work for H265 presets

[Ivan Stepanov]

Premiere 25.5.0 (build 13), macOS

Following methods will not work if epr preset is based on H265 (HEVC):

app.encoder.encodeFile(args)
app.encoder.encodeProjectItem(args)
app.encoder.encodeSequence(args)

Methods will return job ID, but nothing will happen. I didn't catch any errors in code.

As soon as I switch preset path to H264, everything works correctly.

It is possible to render with H265 preset in Media Encoder manually.

I've tested same methods on Premiere 24.6.8, H265 preset worked, no problem here.

I didn't test on Windows or older versions of Premiere 25.

[jamieclarke · Accepted solution]

Hi @Ivan Stepanov - please see this article: Why PugetBench for Premiere Pro is Dropping HEVC Encoding Tests

[Ivan Stepanov]

Thank you for the information!

> Adobe has informed us that this error is caused by a change to Premiere Pro, which will no longer allow scripts to export to HEVC.
Is there any details on reasons behind this?

Is there any plan to support HEVC with scripts in the future (maybe UXP)?

[Bruce Bullis]

No.

[Ivan Stepanov]

Got it, thank you!

[jeffbottom]

wow!
So I've just stumbled on this issue and it's a total nightmare for me! 

and it's the same in AME.
oh man, is there really no workaround?
I need to output hundreds of files that require some serious juggling of output variations and permutations, doing that manually is impossible...

[Ivan Stepanov]

I suggest you to try this:
- add media to Media Encoder via scripting, but use different preset (e.g. h264)
- items will be added to Media Encoder queue
- manual part: select all items in Media Encoder and change preset to h265
- hit render

[jeffbottom]

hey Ivan , thanks for the suggestion. unfortunately in my case the manual part in AME is still too much, I have dozens of presets to wrangle and hundreds of encodes, it's insanity but thats where I'm at. I'll try rolling back before 25.3 and see how I go...

[Ivan Stepanov]

I understand, I wish you good luck!

[jeffbottom]

For anybody else in the same boat who is reading this, rolling back to 25.2.3 worked for me!
Thankfully I had a fairly recent version of my main project file that would still open... phew.
Still, a major bummer moving forward.

[jeffbottom]

hi people

I have a small script I wrote a while ago to send premiere sequences to AME. it works great. but I ran into issues today having not used it in a while. Somthing has changed and now H265 encodes simply won't be added to the queue.

If the preset being called is a quicktime preset everything works fine, but when the preset is an H265 nothing gets added to the queue.  The script executes without errors and .encodeSequence() returns a number that is not zero. but nothing gets added to the Queue. Its driving me crazy. I can use the H265 presets directly in AME without any issue. what could be going on ???

[Bruce Bullis · Accepted solution]

>...what could be going on ???

PPro (and AME) specifically disallow programmatic H265 generation. This is unlikely to change.

[jeffbottom]

hi Bruce

Thanks for the info. Might I ask why? Is it a licensing issue?

ps. when I tried doing this in AME I had a very informative error in the console explaining the problem, it would be great if Prem could do the same. I must have spent about 5 hours trying to troubleshoot what the hell was going on...