Premiere, h.264 and The Sea

[danabnormal]

Hi! Hope you can help.

I'm shooting video with a Mavic Air 2/h.264/dlog/4k/60. However because of where I live a lot of the shots I take involve the sea and Premieres h.264 export encoding when it comes to this seems a little underwhelming. Lots of squares, artifacts etc on what is a nice, clean 4k source.

I've done a test export using Prores and this looks excellent; zero artifacts on the sea but huuuuuuuuge files.

I've also tried ramping the h.264 bitrate on the export up to max but it still produces artifacts.

I have no problem with large files, I have plenty of storage, the problem comes when sending the files to YouTube etc.

Any advice? Is the Premiere h.264 encoder just known to be pants? Would a Prores export followed by a 3rd party h.264 conversion be the way to go?

Cheers!

Dan

 

[Severian]

Hmmm. I've never had a problem with PremPro's 264 coding. I use the same settings (assuming you are shooting 30fps and 1/60 shutter). But honestly, I've not done any filming of the sea. Lakes and rivers, however, don't seem to have this problem for me. Have you tried 265?

 

[Dale D]

Hi! Hope you can help.

I'm shooting video with a Mavic Air 2/h.264/dlog/4k/60. However because of where I live a lot of the shots I take involve the sea and Premieres h.264 export encoding when it comes to this seems a little underwhelming. Lots of squares, artifacts etc on what is a nice, clean 4k source.

I've done a test export using Prores and this looks excellent; zero artifacts on the sea but huuuuuuuuge files.

I've also tried ramping the h.264 bitrate on the export up to max but it still produces artifacts.

I have no problem with large files, I have plenty of storage, the problem comes when sending the files to YouTube etc.

Any advice? Is the Premiere h.264 encoder just known to be pants? Would a Prores export followed by a 3rd party h.264 conversion be the way to go?

Cheers!

Dan

I always use Adobe Premiere Pro, shoot in H.265 (RAW) and use iMAC with 16GB RAW, so I have to use proxies for all of my work. I have found it very helpful to watch these videos. I have found the You Tubes from Matt Johnson extremely helpful.

Hope this helps.

 

[MavicAir2Marc]

If you're shooting 60fps on the Mavic Air 2, it will be H.265, it does not shoot 4K/60 at any other codec. You can use Handbrake to convert it to H.264 if you're having issues with the H.265 codec.

 

[danabnormal]

Thanks all for your responses. You are correct @MavicAir2Marc flipping to 60 FPS does change it to h.265, my mistake.

I'll try an export at h.265 and see if that makes any difference to the artifacts on water I'm experiencing (although I doubt it will as I've tried exporting with the same format as the originals).

I'm also gonna give Handbrake a try and see if transcoding the ProRES export keeps fidelity or not. I'll post my results here.

Thanks!

Dan

 

[danabnormal]

Hi all. Well it does seem like reencoding Premieres render is the way to go in my instance. Even reencoding the output to h.264 from ProRes preserved the detail which Premieres native export was lacking.

Just as a bit of additional info if you're interested there are some comparisons below from the test exports I carried out from Premiere (these may not come out very well so this could be futile!).

Premiere native h.264 export Blurry/mushyness on waves. While played causes blocky artifacts.	Premiere native ProRES export Original fidelity largely kept, can see the traversal of individual waves even when the camera is panning.