Premiere REALLY needs a lossless export option

[Brendan28390092q0le]

Many people render video through different pieces of software, so maintaining the original video quality through each step is important until the media is ready to be lossy encoded. For whatever reason, Premiere cant do this even when they support codecs that literally have a lossless option (h264, h265).

There is a 3rd party codec that can export to lossless AVI but its old and hasnt been updated in years and doesnt handle media that are HDR or color bit depths higher than 8 bit. 264 and 265 can though.

Please for the love of god add a lossless option to Premiere exports for h264 and h265 since these codecs Premiere leverages literally can do lossless.

[R Neil Haugen]

Using long-GOP codec/format for "lossless" encoding is a bit of an intriguing request. Typically, one goes to a mid/upper ProRes, Cineform, or DNx variant to get actual lossless.

Have you tried setting the options for the H.264 encoding? As you can choose all sorts of things including Profile and Level and even to set it to all-intraframe encoding.

I've seen demonstrations where someone set the H.264 settings carefully, and then exported a file like four times, reimporting and exporting ... then applied that fourth generation file to V2, set the blend mode to Difference ... and had a couple pixels show total in a five minute clip.

That's pretty lossless.

Neil

[RockstarBruski]

I knlw the OP is a year old on this topic but there's an interesting discussion about this on reddit that might help at https://www.reddit.com/r/premiere/comments/9w8aec/help_best_settings_to_export_a_lossless_videofile/

[Ann Bens]

Try Prores (visual lossless)

[film-editor]

ProRes or DNxHD at the correct settings are both essentially lossless and way easier to decode. ProResHQ is the standard lossless container for almost every production i've witnessed. The only thing above it is image-sequence based stuff like DPX or TIFF, and honestly id rather have a ProRes4444 file instead.