I want to do my encode using Handbrake. what is a good mezzanine export from Premiere?

[Jody Bruchon]

We’re not talking about transcoding media. We’re talking about using a different lossy final encoder for a completed project and not encoding to a lossy intermediate first. These lossless intermediates can easily be 20GB for 5 minutes of video. Storage has costs ($90 for a 3TB 7200RPM drive is about the best price per GB) and uploads take time (even with a 30 Mbit/sec upstream a 3GB master file will take 13.5 minutes to upload at best) so reducing size for the same or better quality has very real benefits.

[Greg Janza]

I guess I’m confused by what the need would be for a mezzanine export. Storage is now incredibly cheap and so dedicating a drive to archive individual projects makes the archiving process easy.

I Hate Television. I Hate It As Much As Peanuts. But I Can’t Stop Eating Peanuts.
– Orson Welles

[Jody Bruchon]

This isn’t even about archival. It’s about quality and file size concerns. Adobe’s H.264 AVC encoder is not as efficient as x264 (the encoder in Handbrake) tends to be, especially since x264 has constant rate factor (CRF) compression rates whereas Adobe’s encoder only does CBR/VBR. I once had an informational video project destined for upload to YouTube consisting mostly of static frames (it was basically a slideshow with video clips occasionally thrown in) that was encoded to MP4 by Premiere Pro and was 920MB. That file re-encoded in Handbrake was 50MB. That’s a 94% drop in file size and upload time, but the MP4 from PPro is lossy (it lowers video quality on purpose) and adds some mostly invisible artifacting which will be amplified if that “final” MP4 is processed further down the line.

By exporting from PPro to a lossless mezzanine codec you do not introduce any compression artifacts or banding into the video which enables even better and cleaner compression in the final compressor (Handbrake in this case) since a block of pixels that are any given color will ALL be those exact same numeric values instead of having potential variances at macroblock and edge boundaries. Ignoring the size benefits, why wouldn’t you want to reap the quality benefits?

[Greg Janza]

I think we’re in agreement Jody. I create master files in DNxHD 10bit so that any and all flavors of compressions will be as high a quality as possible.

I Hate Television. I Hate It As Much As Peanuts. But I Can’t Stop Eating Peanuts.
– Orson Welles