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Jeff Bellune
Jeff Bellune
Legend
June 19, 2012
Question

x264 Plug-in For Premiere Pro

  • June 19, 2012
  • 13 replies
  • 96838 views

A new plug-in for Premiere Pro has been released that uses the x264 encoder to export to H.264 and H.264 Blu-ray.  I've had a chance to use it a fair bit, and the quality is excellent compared to Premiere Pro's built-in MainConcept H.264 encoder.  It's also fast -- as fast as the Premiere Pro plug-in architecture will allow.

Details here:

x264 PRO | Adobe Creative Suite H.264 Encoder

Disclaimer: As a beta tester for this plug-in, I received a license for x264 PRO as a gift.  But I wouldn't announce the plug-in here if it didn't deliver it's promised quality.

Jeff

    This topic has been closed for replies.

    13 replies

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    E
    erikvliet
    Participant
    November 11, 2012

    One observation as a long time journaist/reviewer who has copies of Episode Engine 6.3.x with the x264 codec plug-in, of Squeeze 8.5 Pro which has the x264 codec built-in and of Media Encoder and Compressor (both without x264 support): the plug-in offered by 3am Digital Studios costs 599 USD normal price and 299 USD promo price.

    That's quite a steep price, especially if you consider Telestream selling an x264 plug-in for any Episode version at 80.65 USD.

    If you have to buy this plug-in at its normal price, it's actually more expensive than the normal version of Episode with the x264 plug-in added to it (575 USD)!

    E
    excited_Genie16B8
    Legend
    November 12, 2012

    Not to mention the fact that you can get x264 encoding outside of PP for free!

    Averdahl
    Community Expert
    AverdahlCommunity Expert
    Community Expert
    June 20, 2012

    I downloaded it and will test it. I have not yet compared the quality, ie MainConcept vs x264 Pro.

    One thing i did notice is that encore chapter markers are not exported so files i import into En has no chapter markers and imo that is a big drawback. Placing markers in Pr and then having to redo it in En is not good when one has many/long assets. Do you know why it don't work with x264, SDK limitation?

    /Roger

    Averdahl
    Community Expert
    AverdahlCommunity Expert
    Community Expert
    June 23, 2012

    I bought the plug-in and asked if Encore Chapter Markers will be supported when exporting from the timeline, and today an update with this support was posted. Brilliant service!

    It's great to give input when the developer listen to the input and then fix it directly.

    /Roger

    Jon Geddes
    Jon Geddes
    Participating Frequently
    July 19, 2012

    I'm using 1.0.1.9 now, but my first tests were with an earlier version.

    So -- new version, codecs removed, encoding method changed, file size

    different, all done at the same time. I'm trying to modify as many

    variables as I can all at once so that I'll never have any idea what

    fixed the issue when it does get fixed.

    Jeff


    I just ran some tests of my own, and thought this might clear up some of the confusion that is going around.

    I imported a 37m 34s .264 video (x264 Pro encoded) into Encore for the first time on this system, and it took 37 seconds. That is one second for every minute of video. The filesize of the video is approximately 7 GB. I believe for the documentary feature that I mentioned before, we had loaded it into an Encore project to test the visual quality of the encode before we actually authored the first official disc in a new project. This initial import is probably when we had to wait 90 seconds or so for it to import, and then on the second import after the video was indexed, it happened instantly.

    Waiting 25 minutes or hours for an import is completely ridiculous. You might want to look into getting a faster system with multiple drives in RAID 0, and use several of the newer SSD's with 500 MB/s transfer rates or faster for the system drive and possibly a cache drive. You can even raid multiple SSD's together for over 1GB/s transfer rates. A very fast CPU is also needed.

    Jon Geddes
    Jon Geddes
    Participating Frequently
    June 19, 2012

    Our company has also started using x264 PRO for all of our H.264 encoding. Extremely high quality (studio quality), MPEG-LA compliant, integrates with Adobe Media Encoder (no more exporting intermediate files to our previous studio quality encoder), perfect customization options... I highly recommend it.

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