[Ivan Myles]

I also like the Sennheiser HD Pro series, FWIW.

[Ivan Myles]

Welcome to the forum, Mathias.

The pixelation or blocking appears directly after a cut from a city street to the woods, which is then followed by high motion footage through the woods. Most likely the blocking is caused by bitrate starving; the required bitrate peaks because of the scene change following by relatively large frame-to-frame differences in the video. By comparison, the reference footage you provided in the second clip is a longer continuous shot.

First, download the re-encoded YouTube file from the Video Manager page within your YouTube account. Play the video from a local disk and scrub through it within Premiere Pro to confirm that this is a YouTube encoding issue and not a bandwidth streaming issue.

As a resolution try using slow motion or a speed ramp when you cut to the woods. It might give the encoder enough headroom to fit a higher quality reference frame at the scene change. If that doesn’t work, intentionally adding noise or blur for a short interval *might* reduce the blocking.

Otherwise, you either need to rethink the edit or upload the file to websites that support higher bitrates. Vimeo produces slightly better results than YouTube; the Internet Archive (archive.org) allows you to upload larger files.

[Ivan Myles]

Looks like a still image and text layer being rotated in unison. Several ways to implement: single comp; nested comp; or prepped in Photoshop/Illustrator and rotated in an AE comp.

[Ivan Myles]

[Tero Ahlfors] “If you’re using uncompressed formats you need a fast RAID for your media.”

Or sufficient SSDs and I/O.

[Murat Ataman] “Do these problems stem from the file/resolution size?

Yes, and the capability of your hardware.

[Murat Ataman] “How can I fix this problem, I have a lot of clips for a 15 minute film including a scene with keying and effects?”

There are several potential actions:

• RAID array or SSD(s) with high speed I/O for storage
• SSD for system and cache drive(s)
• Edit with proxy files and change to camera source files for final render
• Enable video acceleration
• Generate preview files while editing
• Export intermediate files instead of using Dynamic Links with effects

[Ivan Myles]

I like frame blending with pixel motion because missing frames are interpolated from the existing frames. This technique yields the smoothest motion but requires additional processing.

With a 50fps source file frames can be dropped without extra processing:

ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRST @ 50 fps
A-C-E-G-I-K-M-O-Q-S- @ 25 fps
A-C-EF-H-JK-M-OP-R-T @ 30 fps

But with low motion you might be fine with a 25, 29, or 30 fps file. Use the option that works best with your footage and processing requirements.

[Ivan Myles]

Please confirm that this is your setup:

• 4k file
• external hard drive storage
• internal hard drive for applications
• color grading and other effects applied in AE
• Dynamic Link from AE to Premiere Pro
• trying to render and play file in Premiere Pro timeline in real time

[Ivan Myles]

If you are using uncompressed AVI (codec=None) the problem is likely hardware lag caused by the large file size. This will be especially bad with computers using spindle hard disks and constrained RAM. Please provide more information regarding the file and system specs.

[Ivan Myles]

Try frame blending with pixel motion on the 25/29fps test shots to see if there is a difference. Both should look good. Alternatively, is 50fps an option? What about shooting twice to get a set of shots at each speed?

[Ivan Myles]

Welcome to the forum and thank you for including detailed information in your post. The root cause might be related to your AE color management settings, but there are several issues with your workflow.

• What format are your captured (source) files? If Premiere Pro is having trouble injesting, consider transcoding to a standard intermediate format based on a 422/444 10-bit all-intra codec such as ProRes, DNxHD/MXF, AVC-I, or Cineform. If the source files are 8-bit RGB then PNG or JPEG2000 image sequences will also work.

[David Stutzmann] “I color corrected my video in premiere pro, which uses a 0-255 luma range if I’m correct.”

• Using Premiere Pro for color correction is fine. Although its settings are presented as 8-bit RGB the internal color processing supports RGB or YCC (YUV) at up to 32-bits depth per channel. Check that all effects support your preferred color pipeline, otherwise Premiere Pro might be processing internally as 8-bit RGB.

• The first priority is making sure the RGB channels are within 0-255, and this shouldn’t be a problem if your source footage was captured from an 8-bit RGB display. Use the YC Waveform, RGB Parade, and Vectorscope video scopes when setting color levels. If the source footage is YCC, make sure the Y and RGB channels are within 0-100 IRE on the scopes. In practice, I like to set peak luminance around 90-92 IRE to have enough headroom to keep the peak RGB levels under 100 IRE.

• Are you checking the footage to make sure levels look good throughout each clip? Sections of video that are all black or desaturated are likely caused by settings made earlier. Use multiple keyframes to manage levels through the entire duration of each clip.

[David Stutzmann] “Then I export it as H264 .mp4, import it in After Effect and set the color space to Rec. 709 (16-235).”

Going to After Effects might be unnecessary and H.264 definitely is a poor choice of intermediate codec. H.264 is a high compression delivery codec. You are losing a lot of color information when exporting with 4:2:0 color subsampling. This results in a loss of detail and increases the likelihood of color blocking and banding. Use a Dynamic Link between AE and Premiere Pro or export an intermediate file in one of the formats listed above. If you are just tweaking contrast, though, try to do it in Premiere Pro and avoid the extra step to AE.

[David Stutzmann] “here are the specs of the video:

Bit rate : 63.8 Kbps
Bits/(Pixel*Frame) : 0.003”

• That’s a problem. What export settings are you using? YouTube typically compresses to 0.07 bits/pel. I recommend uploading files at 0.20-0.40 bits/pel for best results. That correlates to 4.4-8.8 Mbps target bitrate for a 1280×720 25fps file. Set maximum bitrate to 1.5X-2.0X target and use 2-pass VBR encoding.

[Ivan Myles]

Files can be uploaded at very high bitrates–even ProRes and DNxHD files are supported–but YouTube still compresses them to around 0.07 bits/pixel. By comparison, that’s about 1/10th the bitrate of a blu-ray disc.