Please help me make a quick change to a video and then export without quality loss

[Orlando B]

I downloaded a video clip from my youtube channel. I want to add 15 seconds of blank space to the end for Youtube end screens. BUT I don't want it to lose quality!

Everytime I try to get started in Premiere, the export settings make me anxious. I just want it to keep the same size, scale, framerate, and compression as much as possible. How can I do that? Does it have to be re-encoded? Please help.

[Michael Grenadier · Accepted solution]

there are 2 measures of quality, visible and technical...  generally youtube clips are heavily compressed as mp4's which is an mpeg format.  by it's nature, you are usually decompressing it to work with it and the recompressing it to export it and there will be measurable loss but not necessarily visible loss.  It's very easy to over obsess over this kind of thing.  Generally the safest way to work in premiere is to select the clip in the bin and control click and choose new sequence from clip.  This will match pixel dimensions and frame rate..  When you go to export, choose the youtube preset that matches those settings and you should be good to go.  visually compare the original file and your new exported file and I doubt you'll see any difference.  If you do, post back with your source properties and maybe someone will have some ideas about how to improve the quality.  there are other editing apps which supposedly do not decompress and recompress... not sure how true that is, but as I said, this is something you probably don't need to worry about.  And remember that everyone's viewing experience in youtube is different.  If the end user doesn't have the bandwidth to play the clip at full resolution, youtube will playback a lower resolution...

[Michael Grenadier]

and just remembered, I think there are some editing solutions in youtube studio.  You might see about adding the black there...  Not sure if will give you any better quality, but might help worry less.

[Orlando B]

Youtube studio is helpful for subtracting clips, but it doesn't currently let you add clips or images.
So that may be an answer for some people, but doesn't solve this particular issue for me. 

[Orlando B]

Very helpful!!! Thank you! This is what I needed.