No VBR dual pass for H.265 hardware encoding, stay with H.264 ?

[Letty2019]

Curious why the new PPro 14.3.1  is now hooked up to AMD Rzyen for hardware encoding, but it won't do Dual Pass VBR in H.265 ?  Only single pass for H.264.

I thought dual was always the way to go for bluray creation. 

Does the H.264 work with hardware encoding?  From what I read I didn't think so.

My media is SD old school footage.  I need the dual pass like a fat kid needs cake.

Thoughts?  Opinions?  advice?

Thanks,

Letty

[Ann Bens · Accepted solution]

Two pass is not supported.

https://community.adobe.com/t5/premiere-pro/faq-all-about-hardware-encoding-in-premiere-pro-14-2/td-...

If you want vbr2 dont use hardware encoding.

[Letty2019]

dam, always a catch. 

Isn't VBR 2 pass the way to go for best results for making a bluray?

Why did they do that?  Make it only for single pass?  For YouTubers that don't care about quality??

BTW, can I leave it checked in Preferences, but just don't use it in AME export?

Thank you.

[RjL190365]

I hate to burst your bubble, but the normal H.264 preset does NOT produce Blu-ray compliant files at all. The exported files MUST then be re-encoded and re-compressed by the Blu-ray authoring program, which does degrade image quality to some degree.

Instead, use the H.264 Blu-ray presets for exporting to Blu-ray compliant files. Unfortunately, hardware encoding is not supported at all using the Blu-ray presets. Only software encoding is available.

And old-school SD footage should NEVER be encoded into H.264 (at least the "standard" presets, as opposed to the "H.264 Blu-ray presets) no matter the cost, if image quality is important. That's because all old-school analog SD footage is interlaced, while hardware-encoded H.264 only supports progressive scan properly. And when it comes time to author your SD H.264 footage onto Blu-ray, the authoring software will re-encode and re-compress that anyway.

In other words, you're completely stuck between a rock and a hard place, in this case. Either make separate exports, or accept the severe quality loss due to repeated re-encoding and re-compression.

And lastly, you cannot export into an interlaced video format using hardware encoding. Only progressive or de-interlaced exports may be hardware-encoded. And you might have already degraded the quality of your captures by using a cheapo capture device to begin with: It always de-interlaces interlaced content using the brute-force "drop every other field" or "blend every pair of adjacent fields" method even before it exports to a file.

[Letty2019]

My 'old school' footage was shot on a Panasonic DVX100a , mini DV,  24pa   (progressive advanced) non drop frame.

4:3 native  24fps.

I've used the h.264-bluray preset and it doesn't look bad.  Of course, I'm never going to get perfect quality, because I've upscaled the 720x480 footage (in PPro, standard frame upscale) up to standard wide screen 1080 w/letter boxing.  The framing actually worked out, but the image quality suffers.

Does the info you sent me also apply to this type of footage?

If not, what would you recommend for final output to disc for best results?  

The footage is 24.4 Mb/s so I was setting my disc output to VBR, 2 pass, 22.5 to 25mbps.  I did NOT check the 'render at full max' but I'm not sure  if it will make a difference if I do?

Thanks very much for your advice!

Letty

[RjL190365]

Oh, I had assumed that it was analog. But since your work is digital 4:3 "progressive" (actually, telecined), much of what I stated still applies: You will lose image quality when converting your 4:3 digital SD footage to H.264 no matter what. And the normal H.264 output preset does not produce a Blu-ray-compliant file at all. That file must then get re-compressed and re-encoded when you try to author a Blu-ray disc using a proper authoring program. And every conversion step will degrade image quality no matter what. Simply burning the files directly onto disc will NOT produce a result that is playable at all on any standalone player.

[Letty2019]

I'm using AME to export the file, using the h.264-bluray preset, then I use TMPGEnc Authoring Works 6 to author / burn the files to the bluray disc.

What would be a better preset other than the h.264-bluray for my type of footage?
Thanks for your reply 🙂

Letty