Adobe premiere export settings for Best quality and lowest filesize?

[archz2]

I am using adobe premiere pro cs6

I am running windows 8.1 (64 bit)

I am trying to cut a portion of duration 7min. 15s minutes from a big video. I am using h264 encoding for the final output as an mp4 file. The sad part is, I am choosing bitrate of 3mbps and still the quality is low (gets pixelated at some points and has low resolution) of the final output of video. The final video has 1920x1080 dimensions but the resolution i.e. the dpi seems to be low.

The source video has a bit rate of 1792 kbps and looks very sharp. What should I do so that my final video is crisp?

The official music videos and trailers on youtube have a very sharp quality and a low file size. I want the same settings for exporting my videos such that the quality is the highest and the file size is the lowest. I shoot videos from my phone camera. It makes a 7-8 minute video of 1GB file size. On the other hand, a very high quality youtube video of 720 p resolution of approximately 1 hour 15 minutes length has that file size.

[SameSelf]

First, official music videos and trailers on youtube start from VERY HIGH QUALITY masters. It is like EVERY SINGLE FRAME of the video was shot with a DSLR camera. The lighting was perfect. The camera had virtually no noise. They had a focus puller so everything was sharp as a tack. Etc. Etc. Then they downsampled the beautiful footage they shot to HD resolution and carefully encoded that with very fine tuned settings for each scene. The end result is an encode that looks fantastic even at super low bitrates.

Now, you are shooting video with phone. It has a tiny lens. The image sensor is small. The lighting is probably poor, and there is a ton of noise in your video. Then the phone encodes that video to a delivery format. It is a hardware based encoder that is optimized for speed, not quality, so that it doesn't drop frames.

You stated that your source video is 1792 kbps. This doesn't sound quite right because that translates to about 0.8 GB/hr for video. Maybe you meant 17,920 kbps? But no matter. The problem you are running into is you are trying to re-encode a video that has already been encoded. And trust me, the phone needs every bit of that 18 Mbps to encode a decent looking video. If you want to maximize the quality, then the only solution sadly is to avoid re-encoding because going from 18 Mbps to 3 Mbps is a big crunch.

I would try exporting at the original bitrate and see if the quality suffers as much. It could be that there is another setting tripping you up. Alternatively, you could try exporting your timeline from PP as a lossless intermediate and using Handbrake's h.264 encoder. However, that involves more steps, and the lossless intermediate file size will be HUGE!

But bottomline, your video is already highly compressed and compressing it more will only make it worse no matter what you do. So it comes down to how much quality are you willing to sacrifice if file size is critical.

[KarMa]

Have to realize that youtube encodes differently for different uploaders. If you are someone with millions of subscribers, you are prolly going to be getting better encoding settings from youtube. Like Vevo with 12 million subs. Now compare that to some kid with 5 subscribers who will get a faster encoding, which means worse quality for the bitrate. The amount of video youtube handles is staggering, so they only reserve the better/slower settings for the select.

Also the H.264 codec in Adobe PP is pretty basic and not really designed with extreme efficiency in mind, but more about speed. So if you want a more bitrate efficient H.264 codec, then nothing really beats x264, which PP does not have. So you could export, as suggested, with a lossless codec like HUFFYUV or Lagarith and then let x264 encode it outside of PP. Handbrake does use x264 along with vidcoder, megui, and many other free GUIs for x264.