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allisonc1993
allisonc1993
Participant
January 10, 2017
Question

Mixed Size Clips resulting in poor render quality

  • January 10, 2017
  • 2 replies
  • 945 views

Hello,

I've been working on a Premiere Pro project that makes use of two different sizes of clips. The first set of clips are those that I filmed myself, and were imported into Premiere as 1920x1080 clips. The second set is just stock footage from Shutterstock, and because we didn't have the budget to purchase the HD or SD versions, these clips are 426x240.

I've been trying to export the video, but every time I export, the stock set of clips always seems much more low-quality than they were when we downloaded them. I've already created the entire project so starting from scratch isn't really an option at this point.

Does anyone know what might be causing my stock footage to render at a much lower quality? What can I do to solve this?

Thank you!!!

    This topic has been closed for replies.

    2 replies

    M
    Meg The Dog
    Inspiring
    January 10, 2017

    Are you editing in a sequence set for the 1920x1080 frame size? Please post a screen shot of your Sequence settings, and post a screen shot of the Summary in the Export Settings Pane.

    If editing in a sequence set for the 1920x1080 frame size, you are enlarging the stock footage clips several magnitudes in size to get them to fit on the frame on that timeline - and that is revealing and exacerbating all the artifacts present in the stock footage.

    Not much you can do about that, if you want the 426x240 stock footage to fill frame.

    Solutions? Buy the full sixe 1920x1080 stock footage.

    MtD

    allisonc1993
    allisonc1993Author
    Participant
    January 10, 2017

    Here are my sequence settings:

    Here are my export settings:

    Unfortunately the HD clips are exponentially more expensive and it's not an option. I've accepted that I won't be able to make these clips appear as high of quality as I'd like, but I'd at least like them to appear as they do in my raw download.

    D
    David Arbor
    Inspiring
    January 10, 2017

    If you want them to appear the way they looked when you download them then your sequence resolution must be 426x240, it's as simple as that. You can scale footage some and get away with it, but again, it depends on your delivery method. There are many other factors that will go into this as well, such as, if you're uploading it to YouTube the file will be accepted, but it's going to be shown on a larger player, which means that YouTube is effectively scaling up your footage and it won't look good.

    D
    David Arbor
    Inspiring
    January 10, 2017

    You actually answered your own question. The resolution of the stock footage is incredibly low, 426x240. You're then blowing that up to 1920x1080. To look at it another way, 1920x1080 is just over 2 megapixels and your stock footage is just over .1 megapixels. There's no getting around this, you have super low res footage and you're blowing it up. There are plug-ins to up rez footage, and After Effects can do a pretty good job of it, but this is an extreme case—nothing you do will be able to improve the quality of this footage.

    The reason you say the footage looks worse than it did when you downloaded it is because you were looking at the clip at 100% of its size when you bought it as stock, i.e. it was really small, so it looked fine. Now that you blew it up by 450% and you're exporting the 1080 version you're seeing the big issue.

    allisonc1993
    allisonc1993Author
    Participant
    January 10, 2017

    Ah, that makes sense. Is there a way I can reduce the larger clip size so I'm not getting such a stark contrast in quality, or would that be pointless? Ultimately I'd like the lowest quality clips to at least look like they do when I open the raw file from the original download on my desktop.

    Thanks

    D
    David Arbor
    Inspiring
    January 10, 2017

    Sure. You can make a new sequence at a smaller resolution, drag your HD clip into the timeline and scale it down inside the Effects Controls panel.

    What's the final destination of this video, and how will it be used? That will help you determine what an appropriate resolution might be. If you went down to 720p then you would scale your 1920x1080 footage down to 67% and you would scale your 426x240 footage up to 300%. It's still going to make your footage look pretty crummy, so again, it all depends on your planned delivery method.

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