Premiere Pro CC soft exports.

[Bill Stengel]

I recently abandoned FCPX for Premiere Pro CC, and I'm exporting my first project (entirely Scarlet-D worked up natively in PP) for Vimeo and it looks terrible. I've tried ProRes 422(HQ), 422, H.264 (highest quality/bitrate/VBR-2) mostly as controls to see what Vimeo does with the files, and everything looks the same - soft and unsharpened even before Vimeo does its thing with it. Despite running the gamut on various sharpening routines - r3d sharpening, efx sharpening and efx unsharp mask - what is coming out all looks basically a hair out of focus. I've also tried Premiere export vs Media Encoder, but to no avail. I'm not looking for hyper-sharp, but I like to go a bit past where I'd normally stop with the expectation of Vimeo softening things a bit on compression.
Even with sharpening turned all the way to 100 (combined with r3d sharpening), the exported files look as if no sharpening has been applied. Am I missing something? Am I exporting from PP-generated proxy files? Is there a dialog that needs to be checked indicating that effects to be applied on export? After the requisite testing and learning with FCPX, I got consistently good results through Compressor but I'm falling short with Premiere.

Thanks!

 

[Christopher-lee dos Santo]

Ive been getting mixed results with Premiere. But it seems you need to setup your project to use maximum depth and maximum render quality. This takes longer to render but uses a better scaling algorithm to get a sharper image.

I swear sometimes when I render my timeline (not exporting, just rendering it for playback in premiere), I get compressed looking images. The images (preview files) are sometimes softer, or you can spot compression. Some edges are blocky for a second then suddenly are not. Then sometimes they are sharp as hell. This is happening before even exporting out.

Still cannot explain it. I was a big FCP 7 fan. I've cut 3 feature films with FCP 7. It works. So... might just go back to offlining. We've recently acquired a RED Rocket X card. So... that may come in handy with transcoding.

Try going to your sequence settings and ticking the boxes for use maximum render quality and maximum depth. Hope that helps.

 

[Stefan Scherperel]

There are many things that could be a factor here. Here are a few things to look for.
-How did you set up your project? Are you editing in a 4K or 5K timeline?
-if you are editing in a 1080P timeline, do you have scale to frame size checked or are you scaling the images?
- In the final render have you tired checking the box "use maximum render quality"? and Maximum Depth?
-Have you made sure to uncheck "use previews" in your final render?

Premiere will only give you what you ask it to, so if you are looking for fast renders it can do that. if you are looking for high quality renders it can do that too. Hell, if you wanted to offline like in FCP7 you could always do that as well. Premiere CC is a much more robust and feature rich package than FCP7 will ever be, you just need to know how to tell it what you want it to do.