Huge Blocky Artifacts in Premiere

Adobe Premiere Pro

Huge Blocky Artifacts in Premiere

Posted by Neil Hilton on November 16, 2015 at 9:54 pm

Look at the back of the subjects head in Premiere compared to in Quicktime.

This is in Premiere:

This is in Quicktime:

Messing around with colors (Lumetri Color Panel) and using remove grain in After Effects did not seem to help at all.

Seems like a compression issue or a bit depth issue? I tried messing around with different codecs etc in the sequence settings to no avail.

Any input would be greatly appreciated.

Edit: So Lumetri color panel wasn’t helping anything but the Color Correction – Brightness & Contrast effect seems to help a lot. So I guess I would like to simply open up my question to what is causing the artifacting to begin with? Do you think clean HDMI out from my Nikon D5300 to an Atomos Ninja 2 (external recorder) would bypass this kind of compression and yield far greater results? Excluding the external recording, is there a way I could have shot it differently to avoid the blockiness?

Thank you.

Neil Hilton replied 10 years, 9 months ago 2 Members · 4 Replies
4 Replies

David Roth weiss
November 16, 2015 at 10:39 pm

Use Grab to make a screengrab of your Sequence Settings then post that here and I’ll show you exactly how “pilot error” is causing this issue.

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Colorist & Workflow Consultant
David Weiss Productions
Los Angeles

David is a Creative COW contributing editor and a forum host of the Apple Final Cut Pro forum.
Neil Hilton
November 16, 2015 at 10:49 pm

Thank you for your response.

Here are the sequence settings you requested.
David Roth weiss
November 16, 2015 at 11:17 pm

Neil,

You are NOT the only one fooled into thing that by setting the Editing Mode at the very top of the Sequence Settings that you’re good to go… Almost everyone is fooled by that…

The most important setting in Sequence Settings is the lower setting, i.e. Video Preview – the I-Frame Only MPEG setting, which is set automatically when the user changes to most of the presets, should really be relabeled to say “Premiere has no clue what to set this to, so do it yourself.”

So, set Video Preview yourself, and think of it as setting the codec you want to master to. I routinely change the Preview File Format to to Quicktime, and change the Code to Apple ProRes 422. That’s a terrific goto setting for editing just about any HD camera original – for those on Windows machines without the ProRes codec, setting to DNXHD 145 is the happening codec.

For the record, setting the Video Preview controls what gets displayed to both your Program Monitor and a client or broadcast monitor, and if you check “Match Sequence Settings” in the Export Dialog, it will export a master that matches what I just showed you in how to set the Sequence Settings, and it won’t have to re-render the sequence if you’ve already rendered it, making exporting your master considerably faster.

Make sense???

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Colorist & Workflow Consultant
David Weiss Productions
Los Angeles

David is a Creative COW contributing editor and a forum host of the Apple Final Cut Pro forum.
Neil Hilton
November 16, 2015 at 11:22 pm

I’m working on a Windows PC and don’t appear to have the Apple ProRes option, even after selecting Quicktime as the Preview File Format.

I tried Quicktime > Uncompressed YUV 4:2:2 and it doesn’t seem to change the compression artifacts.

I’m beginning to think that the artifacts are there out of the camera and that the only reason you don’t see them as obviously when played in Quicktime is because of the default brightness of Quicktime compared to Premiere.

Thank you for all your help thus far.

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