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Video Quality Slight Downgrade from File to Premier
When I open a video file on my computer, the footage looks great. Very crisp and sharp. However, when I import it into Premier, the quality of that footage appears to downgrade slightly, and I don’t know why. It’s subtle, but I want to make sure I’m doing all that I can to preserve the quality of the footage from the original file.
My Premier sequence settings that I import my footage to is Digital SLR, 720p24. I shoot in 24 too for what it’s worth.
My export settings are H.264, 1280×720. My bitrate is VBR, 1 pass with Target Bitrate set at 8 and my Max Bitrate at 10.
Anyone know what the deal is with the slight downgrade? Thanks in advance!
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3 Replies
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You are bringing in H.264…which is a highly compressed file type. And then editing, and the RECOMPRESSING it again, to H.264. That will lose quality. Any time you recompress, it’ll lose quality, and H.264 to H.264…yeah, you’ll see the difference. ProRes to H.264, you’ll see a difference. Not much you can do about that, H.264 throws away data to maintain smaller file sizes, so quality is lost.
Shane
Little Frog Post
Read my blog, Little Frog in High Def -
Thanks Shane! What do you suggest I do to correct that? Is there a solution?
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You said the quality degrades when you import into Premiere, but then also talk about H.264 export. At what point do you see an issue? If in Premiere before exporting, check the Program window and make sure quality is set to FULL and not 1/2 or something. Also, very important that the Sequence Settings match the source material – if the frame size or frame rate are different than the source material, that will also affect what you see in Premiere, as well as hurting the output quality due to the conversion of those factors.
Assuming Sequence does match material, to get better quality output, consider using 2-Pass VBR and also increasing the data rate.
Most camcorders are recording at between 24 and 28mbps. Your export is 10mbps, and that is less than HALF of what the source was, so of course it may not look as good!
Thanks
Jeff Pulera
Safe Harbor Computers
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