Premiere/Encoder exporting h.264 in Non-Drop Frame or Drop Frame randomly

Report · May 30, 2019

Our post house process hundreds of Sequences through Premiere and Encoder a month. Our source footage is always a mixed bag of frame rates and codecs. Regardless of the source material all of our Sequences are set to Drop Frame TC in whatever frame rate is appropriate for the material based on source frame rates. All the Sequences are exported as h.264.

Despite all of the Sequences being Drop Frame the mp4 h.264 files that come out of Premiere and Encoder are either Drop Frame or Non-Drop Frame seemingly randomly. While it is simple enough to get Premiere to interpret the files differently with a few different menu options, other broadcast equipment further down our production chain relies on that inherent TC in a file to be correct.

In short is there a way to force Premiere and Encoder to export as Drop Frame?

We've experienced this across all the various versions 12 and 13.

Thanks for any assistance.

Report · May 30, 2019

I've never experienced that issue, but may just be unaware of it.

Is this across multiple workstations or just one?

Are you using a consistent export Preset?

Does that Preset specify the timecode format?

MtD

Report · May 30, 2019

We've tested this in many different configurations of workstation usage. It occurs regardless of a project being completed on a single workstation or across several workstations.

We use a single consistent custom preset.

I've not seen anywhere in an export preset to specify the timecode format. If that setting exists it seems like it would be incredibly helpful in our situation.

Report · May 30, 2019

In short is there a way to force Premiere and Encoder to export as Drop Frame?

Have you tried to set the Frame Rate manually rather than using Match Source. Using the default Match Source may cause problems with timelines with a mixed bag of frame rates.

Report · May 30, 2019

We have tested both manually setting the frame rate to the rate desired for the final file and used "Based on Source". It doesn't appear that TC configuration and Frame Rate are linked in the Export Presets, but I am new to Adobe products and am just learning intricacies. We've never had a sequence export at an unexpected Frame Rate using based on "Based on Source" settings.

The latest sequence we had this issue with was all 29.97p DF source.

Report · May 30, 2019

As a brief since I've finally had some time to dig into this issue today, with the 29.97p DF sequence I mentioned above we exported the sequence at the same time out of Premiere and out of Premiere through Encoder. The Premiere only export came out as DF. The Premiere through Encoder export came out as NDF.

I suppose that narrows this down as an Encoder issue, but I am well and truly confused as to how to make Encoder cooperate. This is very much starting to look like a bug to me.

Report · May 30, 2019

You could try unchecking the below preference and give media encoder another try...

Report · May 31, 2019

Morning all,

We did try toggling the "Import sequences natively" option to no avail; however, we do think we found the issue. In the Metadata preferences in Encoder the Export Options was set to "None". Turning this back to "Embed in Output File" fixed the TC mismatch issue across numerous tests.

Thank you everyone for your time and help.

Jason