Premiere Pro Downgrading Quality After Exporting: Why?

Report · May 23, 2017

I recently picked back up at video editing, and I've made a few videos. My first two were fine, in terms of video quality, they were clearly 1080p 60fps. My newest video that I've recently finished exports in what appears to be a lower quality. I have used all of the same settings for each video:

Format: H.264

Width: 1920

Height: 1080

Frame Rate: 60

Field Order: Progressive

Aspect: Square Pixels

TV Standard: NTSC

Profile: High

Level: 5.1

Bitrate Settings:

Encoding: VBR, 2 Pass

Target Bitrate: 14

Max Bitrate: 16

Use Max Render Quality is checked. Audio is untouched. I tried screenshotting what I meant, but that does not seem to be working for me at the moment. To describe the problem further, I exported my first video with no problem: it came out buttery smooth with full resolution and my desired framerate. My second video took longer to export because the first few times it came out looking more muddy than it showed in the window during editing. After changing my settings back to what they normally are (see above), somehow it fixed the problem. Now, it exports, no matter how I change my settings, to a lower resolution: just overall grainy and very muddy, not at all like the crystal clear resolution I'm seeing while editing. Why is this happening?

Thank you,

Dave

Report · May 23, 2017

Sounds like you have source footage in your Sequence that does not hold up to H264 encoding.

Some compression types are good for editing (like Apple ProRes 422, Cineform, Avid DNxHD) and some are not.

H264 files are very much like JPEG still images. There's compression loss in the file to begin with. If the amount of compression is very low, the image quality can be very good; however, the compression is still there. If a lot of compression is applied, the image quality will be fairly low. Creating second, third and fourth generation files will look progressively worse.

It sounds like you care about image quality (as we all should). You want to switch to a CODEC where the 2nd generation file is visually indistinguishable form the original and has a high PSNR (peak signal noise ratio).

-Warren

Report · May 23, 2017

What format would you recommend I switch to? Sorry for the silly question, but I'm still slightly new to this and haven't used premiere since 2009.

Report · May 23, 2017

There are a lot of options, but...

If you're on a Windows machine, Cineform set to 4 should give you pretty good results.

If you're on a Mac, Apple ProRes 422 (LT).