[Mads Nybo jørgensen]

Hey Ralph,

It is a tough one to crack. The whole point about H.264 is to compress you video to something that becomes very portable on mobile or internet network. If you are already working with compressed video, then it will continue to remove information, rather than encode it “as was”.

A couple more suggestions for you to look at:
1) Is the source footage actually sized at 1920×1080? Or is it 1440×1080 that is unpacked to 1920×1080?

2) What timeline settings are you using in PPro? I’m wondering whether “cheating” PPro in to thinking that the timeline is uncompressed – or use a heavy compressed codec for TL, whether that will change how the H.264 encoding works at the end of that workflow?

Please let me know how you get on.

All the Best
Mads

@madsvid, London, UK
Check out my other hangouts:
Twitter: @madsvid
https://mads-thinkingoutloud.blogspot.co.uk

[Mads Nybo jørgensen]

Hey Ralph,

Don’t worry about the cross-posting as the original post was quite extensive, and the second was just a call-out to separate part of the community.

One thing that I would suggest you try is to export the video to an uncompressed file, then re-encode that file to H.264 and see if the encoder will ignore the small artifacts that it seems to magnify when going straight from H.264 to H.264.

The other alternative is to look at noise-reduction. This was quite common to use when HDV was the carrying format for low budget HD production. However, a top-notch filter may cost you money. I haven’t tried any build in solutions in either PPro or AE, but it is worth considering if there is a budget for it.

Obviously the other question is: why H.264? Would the end “client” entertain a MPeg-2 or Windows Media Player file? And does those look better than the H.264?

All the Best
Mads

@madsvid, London, UK
Check out my other hangouts:
Twitter: @madsvid
https://mads-thinkingoutloud.blogspot.co.uk

[Mads Nybo jørgensen]

Hey Rob,

Good that you are back in business – nothing worse than loosing 3 weeks work, which I have been through in past job in a past lifetime.

You shouldn’t have had to uninstall CC2015 in order to run CC2014. However, if what you have now is working, don’t fix it – wait, and return to it once project is delivered and signed off. By then, the awaited end of July bug-fix for PPro and AE CC2015 would have been released and thoroughly tested by the community.

I am not a Mac person, so there are more intelligent people around here who can help you. However, I run 16GB on my HP and would recommend that if possible, that you beef your memory up to at least 8GB.

Happy hunting the end of that project.

All the Best
Mads

@madsvid, London, UK
Check out my other hangouts:
Twitter: @madsvid
https://mads-thinkingoutloud.blogspot.co.uk

[Mads Nybo jørgensen]

Hey Ralph,

My personal preference on my PC is to avoid H264 at all costs, particularly if it’s done through Apple QT codec – however, sometimes that can’t be helped.

Nevertheless, as someone suggested on the Adobe forum, it may be that your footage already have artifacts in it, that is being exposed through re-encoding it.

My initial suggestion would be to do an uncompressed export and compare that with the original. If it doesn’t happen there, then it is your H264 settings that you need to work on.

The other thing to try is to turn off
“Render at maximum depth”
&
“Use Maximum Render Quality”
as you are already working compressed and you are not currently adding any graphics or fx to the video, I see no advantage in having those boxes ticked – if anything, it by trying to make it too beautiful, this may be the reason for the artifacts coming out.

Although it doesn’t give you 60fps, have you run a test through the “H.264 Blu-ray” codec also included with PPro?

It is all about finding an output that gives you a minimum of artifacts, whilst being close to your desired result. Do keep mind though out that you are re-encoding already compressed footage, and that it will never improve – unless you use specific software to remove the “noise” with, but even that is not always perfect depending on your final method of distribution.

All the Best
Mads

@madsvid, London, UK
Check out my other hangouts:
Twitter: @madsvid
https://mads-thinkingoutloud.blogspot.co.uk

[Mads Nybo jørgensen]

Hey Rob,

You are not helping us to help you. What hardware are you using? And operating system?

And have you considered to return to CC2014, which is easy to do, whilst you work out what the problem is with CC2015.

All the Best
Mads

@madsvid, London, UK
Check out my other hangouts:
Twitter: @madsvid
https://mads-thinkingoutloud.blogspot.co.uk

[Mads Nybo jørgensen]

Hey David,

[David Roth Weiss] “When Tim suggests HP has a department that specializes in video support etc., I don’t believe he is speaking from personal experience, but rather from HP’s marketing materials. HP will fix your workstation, but if there’s anything else wrong, drivers, add on peripherals, networking, etc., their technicians will not touch it.”

With all due respect to your own experiences, I disagree with this. My HP ZBook pro works like a dream for Adobe CC and HP is keeping me very happy with pushing out drivers and notices. The Laptop itself is a portable video workstation (as suggested by HP directly when I discussed it with them), and HP built it for that purpose. So you may not have found the department within HP, but they do exist and they are very good at what they do.

All the Best
Mads

@madsvid, London, UK
Check out my other hangouts:
Twitter: @madsvid
https://mads-thinkingoutloud.blogspot.co.uk

[Mads Nybo jørgensen]

Hey Joseph,

[Joseph Owens] “Recently a project landed that was cut in Creative Cloud 2014, which of course I could not open, and was advised to download the free 30-day trial of the software, which seemed to be a solution, except that the project, or at least what I call some “poison pill” attributes — maybe Fx plugins that may or may not be active, exist or be in themselves not compatible with CC2015 (the famous Red Giant MBCC2 missing error)…”

As part of your 3o day free trial, did you down-load and try open the project in CC 2014? Rather than CC 2015.

All the Best
Mads

@madsvid, London, UK
Check out my other hangouts:
Twitter: @madsvid
https://mads-thinkingoutloud.blogspot.co.uk

[Mads Nybo jørgensen]

Hey David,

[David Roth Weiss] “Believe it or not, my newest pet is a Preying Mantis. Do you think Hightail would require his/her contact info? I’m prepared to give them my dog’s last three years tax returns, but I hadn’t figured the Mantis into my fiscal 2015 budget.”

I do believe, except it is disappointing that you didn’t get two of them. However, I am sure that MBNA or Capital One will give your Preying Mantis a Credit Card, which should keep it happy viewing for the foreseeable future.

Although I am sure that the dog would prefer the National Geographic channel which should have much more animal-on-animal action in it…

Before any of the above can happen you must set up email addresses for each of the pets – and don’t apply for anything else until you receive the $30 Million offer from a Nigerian Prince.

See what happened here? I just sorted your life out, and wasted everyone else’s 😉

All the Best
Mads

@madsvid, London, UK
Check out my other hangouts:
Twitter: @madsvid
https://mads-thinkingoutloud.blogspot.co.uk

[Mads Nybo jørgensen]

[Bryan Roberts] “In the FAQ it says Spaces Pro is $15/mo. Not bad… if it didn’t require clients to sign up for an account before they can view a file. Ugh.”

Thank you.

And yes, there seems to be a misunderstanding by some companies that anyone using a modern “app” will want all their family, friends, associates, clients, horse, dog, hamster etc to hand over their details too…

At least the main Hightail service does not suffer from the same issue as one can distribute files to anyone without them having to get engaged, be married and have children with Hightail – I shall have words with them directly.

All the Best
Mads

@madsvid, London, UK
Check out my other hangouts:
Twitter: @madsvid
https://mads-thinkingoutloud.blogspot.co.uk

[Mads Nybo jørgensen]

Hey Bryan,

[Bryan Roberts] “I just read the nail in the coffin for Hightail Spaces. On their Vimeo video which has comments under it, it appears people found out that if you send a link to a client who isn’t a member of Hightail Spaces, it requires them to sign up for a free account in order to even view the files. A support member of Hightail Spaces confirms this and makes it sound like this is going to be something permanent that they as a team had already discussed. That does it for me, Hightail Spaces is out.”

Interesting, Thank You. As said earlier, I am a long time Hightail user as it allows me to track the videos that I send to my clients.

However, I do not like being offered a “trial” for 30 days where I don’t know the cost of it once I commit.

In any case, I would expect Adobe CC to have that as an offering within the package. I know that you used to be able to send videos to clients for comments in one of the earlier CS versions, just haven’t worked out how to do it in CC. But a qualified guess would be to embed the video into a pdf document. This method obviously won’t solve your original problem of needing instant playback.

All the Best
Mads

@madsvid, London, UK
Check out my other hangouts:
Twitter: @madsvid
https://mads-thinkingoutloud.blogspot.co.uk