[Brent Taylor]

“is the matte set to multiplied or straight alpha or none? those cause massive problems.”

It’s just set to “Normal” on the blending mode, but there’s no mask or anything with it so changing this setting doesn’t affect anything.

“are you using adjustment layers?”

No.

“are you using masks?”

No, none of these either.

“sequence – maximum quality checked?”

Tried it… doesn’t seem to fix it. Messed around with all 3 of the checkboxes in that area… doesn’t seem to affect the issue.

“Delete work area and render files”

No luck…

“delete media cache

No luck here, either…

“Premiere Pro 11.0.2 update just came out and fixes a lot of stuff.”

Experimenting with 2017, it seems to be acting the same.

So far the only thing that makes a difference is toggling between GPU CUDA and Mercury Only for the previews. With GPU on, the problem disappears in some circumstances (nested footage with a transition is ok, but a layer on top of it still won’t fade properly).

But in the render, the problem comes back in both cases, even if I specify GPU CUDA in AME.

Weird…

[Brent Taylor]

Thanks Chris. Didn’t know about that option.

It does affect the rate of the dissolve a little, so it might be relevant, but it doesn’t fix the problem. 🙁

[Brent Taylor]

I KNOW that Premiere is capable of doing this, because if I throw the white background and footage into a linked After Effects composition, everything works absolutely fine. That’s just a real pain of a workaround… there’s got to be another way to perform this very simple action.

[Brent Taylor]

Double checked the pixel aspect ratios and they’re all the same.

The Position parameter was changed, yes. That was part of the point to begin with if you read what I was trying to do. But that shouldn’t cause this problem. Fading a black layer over two white layers that look identical shouldn’t cause a noticeable black bar to appear during the fade.

[Brent Taylor]

Hmm… nope. Using opacity keyframes is doing the same thing over here. ☹

That works on your end though, huh? I wonder if that gives us some kind of clue.

[Brent Taylor]

Still more notes…

1) The problem that I thought nesting fixed failed to fix it in the actual render, even though it looked fine in the preview window.

2) Used a co-workers Mac and recreated original problem easily on an entirely new project.

3) Used the same co-worker’s Mac to open the project that had looked fine on my computer until render. On this computer, the problem was immediately apparent in preview window and in the exports as well.

So far I’m leaning back to my original theory that the Mercury playback has something to do with it. The PC can’t view projects with OpenCL / CUDA on, and the Macs can’t view projects that I’ve sent over with Mercury software only.

However that doesn’t explain all the issues I’m having. It’s very strange.

[Brent Taylor]

Update:

I tried importing only the relevant sequence into a new project in case something was wrong with the project file. After doing that, nested clips consistently fade properly, but putting black video and fading it over two layers in the sequence (as seen in the example) still give me the same problem.

I can see why I’d have this problem if I were trying to fade BOTH the video and the matte with their own crossfades. But fading something on top of both of them shouldn’t have this effect (again, it stumped Adobe support too, so I’m not sure this is a case of “working as designed”).

Anyhow, the nesting gave me a better workaround than relying on throwing it into an After Effects linked comp, but still not a great one… if I need to make adjustments to the video later it’s still a problem.

I’m reluctant to even bring it up because I feel like nesting has occasionally worked in the past, only to stop working again just when I thought I had the problem solved…

That said, hopefully it sheds some more light on the situation? Still twisting in the wind on this one.

[Brent Taylor]

My apologies. My hope was that since everything I’ve tried so far has more or less been unsuccessful shots in the dark, we could start with things that people have had some success with and try the process of elimination from there. Most of what I’ve tried looks great locally… just not on YouTube. It all to be a shot in the dark without knowing the magic combination. It seems to be less about knowing how to render well and more about knowing what it is exactly that YouTube wants to see?

I’m working off the final version of the CC 2014 suite for all programs. I’m encoding with Media Encoder. So that’s the 2014.2 release, Build 8.2.0.54. I’m on a Windows machine with Windows 7.

Here are the settings I used to create my initial working files from After Effects. They look great in the Premiere window and in Quicktime. I used these settings on the recommendation of others online. I tried them along with a few other things and agreed that it was the way to go for me:

Format: Quicktime
Post-Render Action: None
Channels: RGB
Depth: Millions of Colors
Color: Premultipled (Matted)
1920 x 1080 (matches project)
Frame Rate: 29.97 (matches project)
Video Codec: Animation
Quality: 100
Keyframe every x frames: Unchecked
Frame reordering: Unchecked
Limit data rate to x: Unchecked

From Premiere, I’ve tried a bunch of things. Plenty of them look fine locally but they all look various degrees of terrible once uploaded to YouTube.

Some scenes look better than others. My backgrounds (high-res stills are used to construct them for the cartoon) occasionally glitch for a few frames, but usually look good. One scene in particular nearly always looks terrible, however. In this scene the characters are driving and I’ve used a moving photograph of cement to create movement. This whole scene looks terrible on YouTube. Everything becomes pixelated and nasty. Again, all the scenes look great locally with a variety of output settings I’ve tried.

The best (but still lousy) thing I’ve tried so far was these settings (which, incidentally are recommended for YouTube):

H.264
Preset: YouTube 1080p
1920 x 1080 (matches project)
Frame Rate 29.97 (matches project)
Field Order: Progressive
Aspect: Square Pixels (1.0)
TV Standard: NTSC
Profile: High
Level: 4.2
Render at Maximum Depth: Unchecked

Bitrate Settings…

Bitrate Encoding: VBR, 1 pass
Target Bitrate: 16 Mbps
Max Birate: 16 MBPS

Advanced Settings…

Key Frame Distance : NA

Use Maximum Render Quality: Unchecked
Use Frame Blending: Unchecked
Use Preview: Unchecked

These are all the standard settings for the H.264 YouTube 1080p preset in AME.

Here’s another one I tried that was somewhat better than the other fails (keep in mind I’m not sure what YouTube is looking for, so I am in fact playing with random settings and hoping for the best).

Format: AVI
Codec: Uncompressed UYVY 422 8bit
Quality: 100
1920 x 1080 (matches project)
Frame Rate 29.97 (matches project)
Field Order: Progressive
Aspect: Square Pixels (1.0)
Render at Maximum Depth: No
Depth: 24 bit

Keyframes: Unchecked
Optimize Stills: Unchecked
Use Maximum Render Quality: Unchecked
Use Frame Blending: Unchecked
Use Preview: Unchecked

I tried this one in Media Encoder early on, it being similar to the settings I used to export from After Effects:

Format: Quicktime
Video Codec: Animation
Quality: 100
Dimensions: 1920 x 1080 (same as project)
Frame Rate: 29.97 (same as project)
Field Order: Progressive

Keyframe every x frames: Unchecked (I’ve tried changing this particular setting but it doesn’t seem to help)
Optimize Stills: No
Frame Reordering: No
Render at Maximum Depth: No
Depth: 24 bit
Limit data rate to: 10,000 kbps (I’ve tried unchecking this completely)

Use Maximum Render Quality: No
Use Previews: No
Use Frame Blending: No

That’s it so far. I tried a few others, too, but didn’t even like how they looked locally.

Thanks for any help.

[Brent Taylor]

I didn’t realize that. I rescind my previous complaint. I knew you could roll back one version when there was an update but I thought it only applied if it was one you had recently. Good to know. Thanks guys. 🙂

[Brent Taylor]

Yeah the new RAM preview is brutal over here, too. It might be a bit faster loading in the first place but getting a smooth playback after it’s done is very unreliable.

I just got a new machine at home and so I’m not sure if I could even install the old version if I tried. 🙁 This is one of the really annoying drawbacks of CC.