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QT H264 exports don’t look good at lower bit rates
Dunno if anyone else has experienced this. Out of Final Cut, Avid, or via Compressor, I could export an h264 QT at say 540p, 2,200 kbps and get a pretty darn good client approval video.
But in Premiere, at the same bitrate, the file I output looks super chunky. I’ve had to bump the quality WAY up for H264 QT, so a file that might be 100MB out of my other software winds up being nearly a gig out of Premiere to get the same apparent visual quality.
After getting frustrated I’ve started exporting h264 with no bitrate setting at full max, then going through Quicktime settings to re-compress. This gives me a good looking file at the size I’d expect, but it’s an extra step, and more time from me.
I’ve tried tweaking settings like frame re-ordering. I tried the Max quality but that boosted my export time from 30 min to 5 hours so I abandoned that real quick.
Anyone else experiencing this? I’ve noticed Premiere doesn’t even have presents for H264 QT, just the h264s out of the QT wrapper (ex .mp4). The only thing I can guess is because Adobe and Apple hate each other, it’s decided not to implement good QT compression?
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4 Replies
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It works for me ok.
do you have the quality slider set to maximum?
I use 2,000kbps, exporting with a h.264 setting
and it exports an .movCS6
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Yup, I get a Quicktime, but it looks HORRIBLE.
As a point of comparison, here is an h264 QT vs an h264 .mp4 right out of Premiere, both set to similar settings, around 2 mbits. You’ll notice that the QT file is bigger and uglier:
https://dl.dropbox.com/u/12090310/Compress_compare.zip
Here are my QT settings:
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I’ve gotten good results if I set the keyframes to the framerate and turn on optimize stills.
Also your sequence is 4K, you might get a better result (and longer render time) by turning on maximum render quality.
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Turning on keyframes for every 24 frames made a HUGE difference. Not sure why the default is off. Finally got a file that loooks good at a small file-size.
For apple products (Quciktime, FCP, Compressor), I always use “automatic” for keyframes. I am guessing apple does scene detection and figures out the best place to put keyframes based on content. Whereas Adobe doesn’t have that level of complexity for Quicktime encoding.
The “Maximum Render Quality” option made a 3 min seq take six hours (vs 40 mins) and looked MARGINALLY sharper, though this created it’s own artifacting issues on some graphics I had with moves. I have decided to never use this setting.
What DOES help is to render all effects, and then click “use previews”.
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