@Daniel Laan Actually, it still stands! I did see the announcement at CES 2025 for 4:2:2 encode and decode for the latest RTX 50-series GPUs, which is great to see!   However, it is up to Adobe to impliment support for it in their software; which after the announcement, I hope it happens soon.   For instance, the RTX 4090 supports 4:4:4 encode/decode on codecs like H.264 and HEVC. But Adobe doesn't have support for that at the moment. ... View more

Perhaps it may help if the Adobe team provide some sort of input and maybe potentially set the status of this feature request to something like "Acknowledged" at least just so that we have some form of reassurance that the folks at Adobe do in fact hear us regarding this topic.   It has been an ongoing discussion for over a year now since this feature request was made. Lots of perspectives have been expressed and it's been proven to be quite a hot topic.   I'm not sure what the prerequisites are for a feature request to be considered "Acknowledged" by Adobe, but it could help with just knowing that we are all being heard. For all I know, it could just be "luck of the draw".   I'm also with @R Neil Haugen on the AV1 codec having great benefits as well as tradeoffs, but also its place on the priority list at Adobe is rather iffy depending on the data from its user base, whether they be professionals or simply hobbyists.   Regardless, I'll still champion for the inclusion of AV1 support (at least as a deliverable codec to export to!). It's taken them quite some time for them to bring back MKV support that they removed long ago so they could be focusing on that first before AV1. But who knows how their priority list is ordered, heh. ... View more

@MyerPj   OP poster here. I wouldn't exactly dismiss AV1 as another "lousy to edit" codec. It's simply not being supported nor hardware accelerated. It is a "relatively" new technology that has a lot of great benefits to the way we create and consume content.   Transcoding to any other codec (aside from proxies) degrades the quality of your footage for the sake of better editing performance because you're compressing footage again and it's a one-way street (you can't go back).   My personal editing philosophy....no editor should have to do that unless there is no other option or they have a tool like Topaz Video AI to enhance and eliminate compression artefacts when transcoding.   We want to make amazing stuff, but also make our lives easier without compromising on quality.   There is a reason we have hardware acceleration support for H.264 and HEVC/H.265. The entire editing process becomes so much more bearable and streamlined that it's almost like editing ProRes footage when scrolling/navigating the timeline. And with the new upcoming v25 update to Premiere Pro, we now have even more hardware acceleration support for those codecs (buttery smooth editing for 10-bit 4:2:0 footage may not seem like much, but it's something!). No need for transcoding!   As long as AV1 not only gains support but also hardware acceleration, in my opinion that changes the game when it comes to editing performance and the quality of your deliverables. I mean, who doesn't want better looking videos with smaller file sizes? Saves money on storage!   If DaVinci Resolve can do it, then so can Premiere Pro. And it just might be one of those things that makes Adobe appear even more worth the investment.   But yeah, those are my two cents. ... View more

Hi everyone! Gonna revive the thread over here with a little update I noticed.   In the Premiere Pro Beta v24.6, I saw this change regarding more hardware acceleration support for H.264 and HEVC media files.     If this is what I believe it is, then Premiere Pro may possibly now have hardware acceleration for 8-bit 422 and 10-bit 420 footage in the H.264 and HEVC codecs. That means much smoother playback!   The only part that kind of throws me off is the word "streams". I hope I'm not misinterpreting anything but feel free to clarify if I am.   In other words, since this post I did learn more about what works best for editing in Premiere when recording in H.264 with OBS Studio.   I learned that the NV12 color format is hardware accelerated so that's what allows Premiere to play back H.264 files a lot more smoothly than other footage recorded in H.264 (playback quality is actually quite similar to ProRes playback).   Overall though, I'm curious to hear other people's takes on this update change in the Premiere Pro Beta v24.6. Feel free to share! ... View more

@Mike McCarthy I have, actually! I've worked on projects, recording in both HEVC 4:4:4 and HEVC 4:2:0 in 8-bit MOV and MP4. I tend to interchange between these two depending on the project.   Thankfully, the quality difference on my end isn't super substantial but that's mainly because I don't push my color grades that much, knowing the limits of the 8-bit and chroma subsampling.   In the Unity engine, I do record with the image having an HLG-like color profile to preserve some of the detail in the shadows and highlights. This does, in fact, help a good bit when in the postproduction phase.   Even though my case is centered around a virtual production, I feel the same should be considered for live-action productions as most creative professionals are recording in at least 10-bit 4:2:2 or higher.   If I do push the color grades for HEVC 4:2:0, then that's when I tend to notice the blocky artefacting and noise in the colors. With HEVC 4:4:4 footage, I am able to push the grade more without introducing artefacting and noise by a modest amount.   So overall, there is a quality difference that you can notice if you really look for it and push it. Since this is CG footage, perhaps it may be more forgiving on the quality side of things when recording to a compressed codec.   In OBS, unfortunately there aren't any options that allow for 4:2:2 that's possible at the moment (there is the P216 color format, but that is 16-bit 4:2:2 and there is no way to record that with H.264 or HEVC at the moment).   Interestingly enough, the same playback issue does happen with HEVC 4:2:0. I talk more in detail about it in the post mentioned above but I'll put it here for convenience (I have it marked as the correct answer.): https://community.adobe.com/t5/premiere-pro-bugs/hevc-8-bit-4-4-4-footage-is-very-hard-to-playback-in-premiere-pro-sometimes/idi-p/14229324   Long story short, I don't really have a good answer as to why it also happens with HEVC 4:2:0 other than that maybe Microsoft's HEVC extension is buggy.   I was trying to avoid H.264 due to quality concerns, but worst case scenario, I may have to suck it up and use that codec if it really comes down to it and use a high enough bitrate to still get a clean image.   Recording in 4:4:4 has been mainly to preserve as much detail as I can when in the posproduction phase before outputting as 4:2:0. For me, it gives a bit more flexibility; but I do sometimes use 4:2:0 for quick turnaround projects.   I guess what I could do instead is proxy to H.264 instead of ProRes so that I save a bit more on storage with the added benefit of hardware acceleration for H.264 in 4:2:0. That's a possibility.   But basically, I have tested and compared between 4:4:4 and 4:2:0 for HEVC.   Thanks for pitching in! ... View more

No worries! Yeah, I understand. (Also sorry, I have a habit of writing a lot.)   The reason I chose to go with HEVC 8-bit 444 I'll admit is a pretty niche reason. But it ultimately comes down to storage capacity and the medium I'm capturing footage in.   I'm not recording live-action (otherwise, I would definitely be filming in ProRes). It's computer generated content rendered in real-time in the Unity game engine. Virtual production, essentially, but not high budget.   Think of it like the animated movie, Surf's Up, where they filmed their scenes using physical rigs to create an authentic documentary look to their camera movements in the 3D space. That is basically exactly what I'm doing as well as a small community of other people doing this.   To capture this footage, I use OBS Studio.   The majority of the content rendered onscreen is in the sRGB/Rec.709 color space, which is basically 8-bit color. It's user generated content so there isn't much creative control over the color space coverage (and my monitor is sRGB only as well).   OBS Studio can record all flavors of ProRes using the FFmpeg encoder. However, recording in 10-bit color would mostly be diminishing returns due to the nature of the stuff we're filming. And also, OBS didn't have the best recording settings for 10-bit color (limited to 10-bit 4:2:0 in their color formats).   While I have less than a few TB of storage on my working SATA SSD, I didn't want to fill it up so quickly by filming in ProRes even though it's an excellent codec to edit with. I didn't want to use H.264 mainly because it's a very old codec and there are other codecs that do a much better job at compressing data without losing too much quality (ex. HEVC and AV1).   After some testing and experimenting, I concluded that HEVC was able to achieve better image quality at smaller file sizes than H.264 (it's meant to be the successor anyway). AV1 isn't supported in Premiere yet so I couldn't use that codec, unfortunately. I have tried ProRes and the quality is similar to HEVC at the end of the day...given the kind of footage being captured (if it were live-action, then it may be a different story).   I still wanted great color quality so I chose to go with 4:4:4 chroma subsampling so that I get lossless color for postproduction. Thankfully, OBS Studio allows one to record in the I444 color format, which makes this possible.   As far as bitrate goes, I use a feature in OBS called CQP which is a variable bitrate control that works very similar to how the Constant Quality feature in Blackmagic RAW works. The bitrate changes to the best value for what's happening in the frame based on the CQ Level (which acts like a threshold, basically).   As a result, recording in HEVC 8-bit 4:4:4 gave me some of the best footage I needed to capture without compromising too much on quality and storage.   But yeah! That has mainly been my reason.   As I'm writing this, I'm slowly starting to realize that I probably should just get more storage. A NAS is on my list but a little out of reach at the moment.   I'm someone who loves the speed of SSDs but can be a bit ambitious on storage and would prefer to have internal SSDs than external because I'm trying to avoid creating a pile of filled up storage drives.   But hopefully, this helps give some more context to why I very much suggest for more hardware decoding support.   Thank you so much for pitching in! ... View more

When it comes to what software (ie. Premiere Pro) receives hardware decoding support for certain kinds of codecs, is it really determined by the hardware manufacturers?   Their GPUs are proven to handle these different flavors of H.264 and HEVC codecs. Does Adobe have to contact these hardware manufacturers in order to unlock their GPUs' ability to decode those types of footage? Or is it based on the software application instead and that it's really Premiere Pro that needs to be able to unlock more flavors of these codecs on the GPU?   In that case, I'm a little curious as to how DaVinci Resolve was able to gain more hardware decoding support than Premiere Pro.   Forgive me if I'm clueless. I'm just trying to better understand the big picture here.   To me, it seems a little backwards to limit hardware decoding to only 8-bit 4:2:0 mainly because most modern cameras  nowadays (both mirrorless and cinema cameras) are able to record much higher quality than just 8-bit 4:2:0 (and creative professionals are demanding for higher bit depths and chroma subsampling). I feel like Adobe should be making room for more support as more people are using these higher quality flavors of H.264 and HEVC for their projects.   I understand adoption can be very slow due to other hardware manufacturers and software developers needing to update their tech in order to make room for those new codecs (not mention some needing licensing like HEVC). However, some of these codecs have been around for many years. Adobe being one of the companies heavily versed with different video codecs because of Premiere Pro, I feel they should have included more support than just the bare minumum of 8 to 10-bit 4:2:0 by this point in time....especially when their competitors, like Resolve, now have more hardware decoding support than them.   AMD and NVIDIA I believe should be aware that a good number of their customer user base are creative professionals that rely on their GPUs to complete their projects. For them to not support hardware acceleration of 4:2:2 or higher I feel is very discouraging if that really is true. Video creatives are investing in their products because they expect them to handle various kinds of footage at least somewhat seamlessly.   I get it if the current demand for higher quality flavors of these H.264 and HEVC codecs isn't quite high as mainstream audiences are used to viewing content in 8-bit 4:2:0 in SDR. I'm not asking to change that since I understand that's most likely not going to change anytime soon.   I'm mainly asking for more support on behalf of video editors, VFX artists, filmmakers, and content creators that are working with these codecs constantly. Not everyone is filming in ProRes and not everyone has the storage for it either. I think it's great that we have the option to use more efficent codecs in 10 to 12-bit color and 4:4:4 chroma subsampling, but they need to be easier to work with and playback in editing timelines so that the editing experience is much better and creatives can complete their projects faster.   It does sound like a very tall ask (one might call it a pipe dream even).   However, after my tedious playback issues I feel the lack of hardware decoding support in Premiere is getting pretty out of hand and it's slowing down my (and possibly others') editing process.   Hoping there is at least some form of a solution soon. ... View more

Alrighties! After some research, I think I may have found the answer to my issue and I've narrowed it down to three factors:    Adobe  AMD  Microsoft   1. Adobe The reason I believe this is partly an Adobe issue is that after some research from Puget Systems, I noticed that Adobe Premiere Pro lacks hardware decoding support for a lot of flavors of both H.264 and HEVC.   Here are a couple screenshots below with links to the articles. They come from 2022 so they are pretty recent.   https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/what-h-264-and-h-265-hardware-decoding-is-supported-in-premiere-pro-2120/     https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/what-h-264-and-h-265-hardware-decoding-is-supported-in-davinci-resolve-studio-2122/     Compared to DaVinci Resolve, Resolve has the same amount of support for H.264, but has more support for HEVC footage than Premiere Pro. I may put in a feature request later for more support as I feel this would greatly benefit editors working with lots of different kinds of footage.   Keep in mind that I'm running an RTX 4090 and so it should able to handle all of these different flavors of codecs using NVIDIA's NVDEC for video decoding, according to this chart from Wikipedia.   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nvidia_NVDEC   If Premiere doesn't support hardware decoding for the footage I'm recording, then it's most likely sending that task to my CPU instead of my RTX 4090.   You might notice on the right side of these charts that Intel Quick Sync is mentioned and it supports hardware decoding for not just both H.264 and HEVC, but ALL of the different flavors of HEVC. I'm running a Ryzen 9 7950x, an AMD CPU. This brings me to my next point:   2. AMD The reason I believe AMD is also a part of this issue is that, while Intel CPUs implement their Quick Sync hardware core for decoding and encoding video, AMD CPUs don't have a hardware core for video encoding and decoding.   As Kevin Monahan mentioned in the pinned reply to this post, AMD CPUs are not optimal for Long GOP workflows; most likely because they lack AMD's Video Core Next hardware core that AMD puts in their GPUs.   If AMD were to put Video Core Next into their CPUs, then perhaps video decoding and playback performance would be much better.   However...   3. Microsoft   In my last post, I shared screenshots for the pieces of HEVC footage that have caused me some trouble with playback. One of those clips was in 4:2:0 instead of 4:4:4. I was able to play that clip on my PC, using Microsoft's HEVC extension from the Microsoft Store.   However when the playback issues happened, I tried opening the clip on my PC in File Explorer and for some reason it wouldn't play anymore and gave me an error.   Once the issue went away in Premiere, I went back into my clip in File Explorer and was able to play it back again.   This was one of the strangest things I've ran into in my entire editing career. My only real conclusion I can get out of this is that maybe Microsoft's HEVC extension basically just sucks? Maybe it was a bug of some sort on Microsoft's end, but I would love to know if maybe there is some connection and possibily a solution.   Conclusion Overall, that has been my journey with this issue so far. I'm not sure if I may be onto something. But regardless, I do hope Adobe can enable more hardware decoding support for more flavors of both H.264 and HEVC.   In the meantime, I'll probably either continue to use ProRes proxies or record in a different codec in OBS that's more editor-friendly in Premiere for now.   Thank you to everyone that pitched in! Feel free to let me know if there is anything that may shed some more light on this! ... View more

I gotcha. Thank you for the heads up!   I got to try out MediaInfo and imported a few clips that have given me some trouble in my Premiere timelines (but again, the issue sometimes randomly goes away, heh).   Apparently, all of the clips I've tried all say that they were recorded using Constant Frame Rate (CFR).   1. HEVC, 8-bit 4:4:4, 24fps, AAC Audio, MP4 2. HEVC, 8-bit 4:2:0, 24fps, PCM Audio, MOV 3. HEVC, 8-bit 4:4:4, 30fps, AAC Audio, MOV (Color Range was incorrectly set to Full but that shouldn't matter.) The clips I've tried were all recorded using HEVC, though a couple clips were either 4:4:4 or 4:2:0 chroma subsampling, as well as either in the MOV or MP4 container. They were all recorded using CQP, which explains the "Overall bit rate mode" being Variable.   I don't believe I've tried it with H.264 yet (though, I'm a little concerned with image quality if I do but a good CQP Level in Bitrate Control in OBS Studio should help).   Not entirely sure what could cause the issue if all clips were in CFR. Hopefully, there's a way to find the issue! ... View more

Gonna revive the thread and pitch in my two cents here. I also very much support the implementation of the JPEG XL (.jxl) image file format in Adobe products.   After some research, I understand that JPEG XL has the benefits of a more efficent compression standard as well as better image quality when preserving the details. Having a smaller file size while also having better image quality on export means that images using JPEG XL will not only be much better looking, but will also be easier to store as well as display to audiences and consumers.   I also support the inclusion of the AVIF image file format as well since they both perform similarly. However, see that there is some form of contention between JPEG XL and Google that they would rather prefer AVIF over JPEG XL. I do hope there can be some settlement there.   I feel if Adobe were to enable support for the JPEG XL (.jxl) file format, then it may open up further opportunities and help influence other companies and brands to support it as well. This helps the artists in preserving the quality of their work, as well as the audiences in appreciating the artwork in all of its detail.   Overall, I highly recommend Adobe to enable support for JPEG XL. It would be wonderful for us to be able to play around with this format and promote higher quality work. ... View more

Thanks for reaching back! Really appreciate the insight. So far, it does sound like the ProRes Proxy workflow is the best workaround for now.   Looking more into it, it sounds like Intel's Quick Sync video processor is more compatible with Premiere Pro than AMD's Video Core Next (VCN) processor.   It's interesting really 'cause I have these settings enabled in the Preferences for Premiere Pro to use my GPU, the RTX 4090, to decode H.264 and HEVC codecs (unless hardware accelerated really meant the CPU).   I also have my video previews set to use ProRes as well. Not sure how much of a difference it makes for playback in the timeline, but I still set it to ProRes HQ or LT in case I need to use them to speed up my exports.     My OBS recordings are typically always using a constant frame rate, like 24fps, 29.97, 60fps, etc. Unless OBS is recording constant frame rates using a VFR method? Here's a screenshot of how my frame rate settings tend to look:   Maybe Premiere Pro doesn't like 24.00fps and prefers 23.976fps instead? Not entirely sure, really.   Overall, it's been a pretty wonky thing to run into. I guess if anything, it'd be nice for either Adobe to further increase support for AMD's Video Core Next or for AMD to further improve Video Core Next's ability to decode H.264 and HEVC codecs.   Again, thanks for responding! ... View more

Ah, looks like I mistyped then. I checked the Beta and initially thought it was for the 2023 version. Now, I see it's for the 24.1 version.   All good! I still hope for the 2024 version to someday maybe implement the suggestion. Thank you, though! ... View more