Web Exports using CS6 (settings question)

[Will Keir]

Hi guys, been spending the last few days testing the export media options in CS6. In premiere they are pretty bad. I'm getting unintended light flickers, very large file sizes in SD and I'm wondering if there is a better program for rending my projects for web viewing?

After the edit is complete and the CC work is done. What program are you using to get high quality exports for the web?

Thanks in advance.

 

[Mike Harrington]

i seldom use the presets...I always do a lot of custom tuning

what formats are you exporting to....

whats your bitrate/codec container ect

 

[Will Keir]

I've tried 5-6 in the last day. Nothing special.

I am using 5k WS as my sequence settings, there are a lot of custom tuning options, what would you suggest?

i seldom use the presets...I always do a lot of custom tuning

what formats are you exporting to....

whats your bitrate/codec container ect

 

[Phil Holland]

@Will - For 2K and 4K web try H.264, 36Mbps, VBR 2 Pass.

You can try at VBR 1 Pass as well to speed things up. VBR 2 Pass will yield better results.

"Render at Maximum Bit Depth" should be checked on. If you down scaling or upscaling, try out "Use Maximum Render Quality".

I'll even sometimes go up to 70Mbps for certain things.

I basically have 4 setting for H.264 for Adobe Media Encoder:
-Dailies RUSH
-Fast Web
-Slow Web
-Slow Max Quality

Slow and Fast are labelled for their encoding speed.

 

[Mike Harrington]

will....

depending on the target audience....I render a lot of tests.... and if bandwidth is important (FTP transfer ect) I see how low I can go using shots that are susceptible to artifacting ect...once I see where it starts breaking down...then I turn up the quality past that....
That is for bandwidth considerations...for pure quality I would think even around 20mbps will be pretty nice

I have to emphasize what phil says....VBR yields much better results then 1 pass VBR or CBR

as far as bitrates...again it depends on your target audience...you rarely see a blu ray encoded over 18mbps...almost never

I have found web acceptable results lower then 10mbps for 720p exports...but always using VBR.....

The settings Phil posted will be close to visually lossless


Its all about testing and tweaking the settings....
and remember if going from high bit depth to 8 bit....you may need to use some noise (1%) to remove banding in fine gradients

EDIT
All the above is using H.264

for any real high quality exports I go cineform High HD

 

[Will Keir]

@Phil. Thanks buddy.

So you are not finding weird "flickers" in your exports that weren't in your project? It's like the brightness levels jump for a split second. I can try doing the export twice, gussing if the flicker shows up in the same spot I should look at the part of the sequence this happens for mistakes.

How large are your 2k web files? Say for a 4 minute duration (music video or short)?

@Will - For 2K and 4K web try H.264, 36Mbps, VBR 2 Pass.

You can try at VBR 1 Pass as well to speed things up. VBR 2 Pass will yield better results.

"Render at Maximum Bit Depth" should be checked on. If you down scaling or upscaling, try out "Use Maximum Render Quality".

I'll even sometimes go up to 70Mbps for certain things.

I basically have 4 setting for H.264 for Adobe Media Encoder:
-Dailies RUSH
-Fast Web
-Slow Web
-Slow Max Quality

Slow and Fast are labelled for their encoding speed.

 

[Will Keir]

Thanks Mike. That's a lot of time rendering. I have a powerful Mac Pro, but no RR. I'm looking at over an hour per 3 minutes of video. I'll do some more tests tonight and post my results here as a bonus. Always nice to share some work.

will....

depending on the target audience....I render a lot of tests.... and if bandwidth is important (FTP transfer ect) I see how low I can go using shots that are susceptible to artifacting ect...once I see where it starts breaking down...then I turn up the quality past that....
That is for bandwidth considerations...for pure quality I would think even around 20mbps will be pretty nice

I have to emphasize what phil says....VBR yields much better results then 1 pass VBR or CBR

as far as bitrates...again it depends on your target audience...you rarely see a blu ray encoded over 18mbps...almost never

I have found web acceptable results lower then 10mbps for 720p exports...but always using VBR.....

The settings Phil posted will be close to visually lossless


Its all about testing and tweaking the settings....
and remember if going from high bit depth to 8 bit....you may need to use some noise (1%) to remove banding in fine gradients

EDIT
All the above is using H.264

for any real high quality exports I go cineform High HD

 

[Mark Pavy]

I would agree if your uploading to youtube or vimeo with the above because they are going to encode it again to much lower bitrates, so it probably makes sense to upload something pretty good (if you have the time and bandwidth). If you're serving the video yourself these datarates are way too high. You'd be surprised how well 2-pass vbr H264 holds up at really low bitrates, of course this is video dependent, lots of scene change may result in artifacting. I've encoded perfectly good 4k H.264 at 12mbits/sec and some 1080p at 4mb/s. I've seen what you describe as brightness levels flickering, check what effects you have on the section where it happens as there are certain video filters that give unexpected results such as this (all the auto contrast, color etc)

 

[Will Keir]

3 hours and 5 minutes later I finished my first export. hahahaha This is on a Powerful Mac Pro... guess it's not so powerful these days, at least where CS6 is concerned. Would a rocket card speed up this part?

Here are my settings. Looks pretty good, it's nice quality, still getting the light flickering. ADOBE WTF guys?

 

[Will Keir]

A little bonus video for those helping answer these questions. Notice the flickering. It's happening on shots without auto correction as well, I checked.

[video]http://www.willkeir.com/REDUSER/TheBeautifulLandEXPORT.mp4[/video]

I am using my FTP to host the 256MB file, seems rather large. How I'll put my two hour movie up on the web is hard to tell. At these settings we are talking over 9GB for web delivery? How?

 

[Will Keir]

I was thinking Premiere Pro's export feature was different than Adobe Media Encoder but they are in fact the exact same program for encoding exports of sequences? Under the hood it's the same beast?

 

[Richard Tran]

are you sure your aspect ratio is not suppose to be 1:1?

 

[Matt Ryan]

Hey Will,
Cool stuff! I'm not seeing a flickering of levels. Are you sure it's not a missing plugin in your system or something?

Now you know why the almost 1 hour Lens shootout video was killing me. Render times are insane!

 

[Daniel Pearson]

I was thinking Premiere Pro's export feature was different than Adobe Media Encoder but they are in fact the exact same program for encoding exports of sequences? Under the hood it's the same beast?

I'm pretty sure they are exactly the same, since when exporting from PPro you can 'queue' which simply opens Media Encoder and ques your sequence for export.

 

[Phil Holland]

Daniel is correct they are the same in terms of what's being used. The cool bit is that you can keep working while Adobe Media Encoder is chewing away and doing it's business.

@Will, Flicking can be caused by codec, player, or even video card issues. What software are you using to playback your material on? Does it flicker when imported into Premiere?

Downloaded your video, and all I see is pretty northern California. No flicker to be found

 

[Mike Harrington]

will,

by rendering tests I meant like 5 seconds here or there....finding the problem shots in terms of succeptible to compression
also I would go with 1:1 pixel aspect...not anamorphic

only do that if you are trying to save bandwidth....the 1.333 pixel aspect could slightly soften your image....

I try to give adobe as little math as possible...

years ago I noticed a huge softening when importing a square pixel pal graphic in a 720 NTSC .9 aspect ratio pixel project exported out as 640x480....
all those little changes and rounding errors in the math add up...

when resizing/moving I never move a pixel by anything less then a full pixel...instead of centering your image at say 959.4 pixels...I always bump it to an even number, as most programs have to do some interpolation on non even pixel values...
same as with scaling...4k to 1080 will scale perfectly as it is exactly 50%....but throw in a small resize...and you are now dealing with some rounding errors...generally as redusers we are so oversampled it makes little difference....but there is some, and it adds up

here's a good link

http://www.fxguide.com/featured/Keeping_Your_Renders_Clean/

 

[Mike Harrington]

I'm pretty sure they are exactly the same, since when exporting from PPro you can 'queue' which simply opens Media Encoder and ques your sequence for export.

Yup I believe they are both 'PPRO Headless'....
one caveat however...for rocket users, to ensure rocket is being used....dont queue to media encoder, as it doesnt seem to take control of the rocket...much safer just doing an export

 

[Daniel Pearson]

The cool bit is that you can keep working while Adobe Media Encoder is chewing away and doing it's business.

Agreed, coming from a compressor and final cut background, I much prefer media encoder now I've changed to a 100% CS6 workflow.

 

[Phil Holland]

Agreed, coming from a compressor and final cut background, I much prefer media encoder now I've changed to a 100% CS6 workflow.

Smart man

I'm pretty much the same here. I'm a PC guy. The only workflow issue I actually have is jumping through a medium sized hoop to get to Prores when clients want that. Most of my deliveries are DPX though.

Everything else is butter in Adobe land. I've been recommending a few things over the last year I hope get implemented.

 

[Daniel Pearson]

Smart man

I'm pretty much the same here. I'm a PC guy. The only workflow issue I actually have is jumping through a medium sized hoop to get to Prores when clients want that. Most of my deliveries are DPX though.

Everything else is butter in Adobe land. I've been recommending a few things over the last year I hope get implemented.

I've been using Premiere on and off for a few years with quite a bit of experience with CS5, but I wasn't totally sold until working on a few projects in CS6. I love CS6.