Export problems with visually complex video

[agustay65744661]

Hi all, I am working on a 3d music video,  my renders are beautiful and crisp but as soon as I put the edit together and export from premeire and media encoder - the quality is shot even in 4k h264. The only way ive gotten good results is with ProRess422 but the file is 16gbs and upload to youtube or vimeo the quality is shot again. 

Anyone have any solutions or any thought as to how to proceed?

in example attached is right is prores left is h264

[Steve Griffiths]

For your H.264 exports from Premiere Pro - what is your datarate setting? For 4k you'll want it at 30-40Mbps. For HD 10-15Mbps or higher. 

If you want to experiment to get the best results - export from Premiere Pro using (say) Prores422 as you already have and then drop that file into Media Encoder and try out a few different settings. Also try some of the Media Encoder presets - YouTube 2160 4K Ultra - for example.

When you are playing back on Youtube or Vimeo are you selecting High Quality playback? On Vimeo for example your video will be encoded by Vimeo to several different sizes - from as low as 240 resolution. And Vimeo will often default to a lower quality stream depending on the connection bandwidth of the user.