Export high quality videos from Premiere cs4 on mac

[hasanali00]

hi,

I am a recent convert from Windows, AutoGK and Premiere Pro to Mac, HandBrake and Premiere CS4.

I am very happy with handbrake because it converts my mpeg2 video to H264 video with very good quality and file size.

However, I am very much struggling with premiere cs4 export settings. I edit my mpeg2 videos in premiere cs4. Then I want to export the edited video and upload it to Youtube.

For the last 2 days, I have been playing with different export settings, But none has given me a satisfactory result.

I have tried the following export settings in premiere cs4:

MPEG2 - HDTV 720p 29.97 High Quality
MPEG2 - HDTV 1080i 29.97 High Quality

H264 - HDTV 720p 23.976 High Quality
H264 - PAL DV High Quality
(and many more settings)

However, none of these exported videos have achieved a satisfactory results. The video quality is not as bright, clear and crisp as Handbrake conversion.

H264 - PAL DV High Quality video was brighter and more clear than HDTV exported video.

In nutshell, my question is how can I export my edited videos in premiere cs4 with clear and hight video quality? What conversion settings should I use?

I am thinking that even if the exported video is very large, i can use Handbrake afterwards to convert the video for youtube.

Really looking forward for your suggestions.
(I am not a professional video editor)

[creamyhorror]

However, none of these exported videos have achieved a satisfactory results. The video quality is not as bright, clear and crisp as Handbrake conversion.

That's probably because Handbrake relies on x264, a better H.264 encoder than Premiere's.

It may also be because your footage is interlaced and Premiere is deinterlacing it. Premiere's deinterlacing is terrible compared to what can be achieved elsewhere. Handbrake uses an average-to-decent deinterlacer (Yadif).

To get around the first issue (assuming the 2nd one isn't the case), I would suggest encoding directly to x264 from Premiere, which is possible on Windows either through x264vfw or Debugmode Frameserver. I don't know if any equivalent options exist for Mac.

To get around the second issue, you can either

1. deinterlace all the footage, encode it in a near-lossless format, then import it into Premiere, or
2. export the edited footage from Premiere in a near-lossless format (e.g. and use Handbrake to deinterlace (using Decomb), resize and encode it.

Unfortunately I'm not familiar with the tools/options available for Mac so others will have to give you the details.

[hasanali00]

I have done some extra experiements. After converting an mpeg2 to H264 with Handbrake, I imported this file into premiere cs4.

Then from premiere cs4, i exported it with H264 (HDTV 720) encoder. I seem to like this result better than the original result of mpeg2 to h264 conversion.