"You're rendering to ProRes, but wanting to export to a long-GOP H.264 format/codec. So it simply cannot re-use that ProRes clip, it must render to create a new H.264 file."
You nailed it. But "it simply cannot re-use" is my beef here. There's no reason it can't. Sure, if my preview format is long-GOP, I can see how that would cause problems but that's why I work with intra-frame codecs for previews, such as ProRes, and there's no reason a ProRes preview file can't be directly transcoded into any other format.
It seems like a pretty glaring omission if there's no way to make Premiere just use the previews to make the H.264 export. I hate to be "that guy" but this is a feature that Final Cut Pro 5 had zero trouble with 15+ years ago, and I could swear Premiere didn't used to have a problem with (I feel like I started seeing this issue a lot around CC 2018 or 2019 - is it just me?)
Example why it matters in the real-world: I'm exporting a long sequence, full of render-intensive effects or color corrections, and need to export several versions with small tweaks or differnet in/outs or whatever. I'd like to be able to render the whole sequence, once, into ProRes or whatever preview format I deem acceptable for my project, and then make my exports from that. But instead of using those ProRes renders, which are perfectly capable of encoding diretly to H.264 really quickly, I gotta wait while it redoes all that work on every export. That's incredibly ineffcient, and has caused real problems for me in the past.
The only workaround seems to be to export the whole sequence as hi-res "match sequence settings" file, then re-import it and make all my H.264s from that. But that shouldn't be necssary: in effect, all i'm doing in that situation if I've already rendered the sequence, is consolidating all those previews into one big file. But that's exactly what the software is already doing in real-time whenever I play the timeline, so why can't it just do that same thing on the export?
I understand the need to re-render direct into the export codec for the sake of quality, avoiding double-compression, artifacting, etc. But if my previews are in some lame, low-quality codec, that's my decision to make, and I even do it sometimes on puprose when i'm doing lo-res exports of works-in-progress (eg: I'll set my previews to ProRes Proxy while rough-cutting, and then re-render in HQ or 4444 when I master).
I get why the Render & Replace process is a good tool to have for some workflows, but the same effect should be achivevable with the previews without the hoop-jumping.
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