- What are the best video export settings in Adobe Premiere Pro? And how do I keep consistent quality in my video when I'm posting? If you're watching this video right now, hopefully it's because
you wanna be posting the highest quality content
that you possibly can. I'm sure we've all had a situation where we went to upload
this beautiful video we had and it just got completely crushed by whatever platform we were posting to. There are a few tricks to working around the compression algorithms of YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and every platform's gonna be different. So today, we're gonna go over how to beat the compression algorithms
of different platforms, what the best export settings are, and how to export the
highest quality video that we possibly can
in Adobe Premiere Pro. (upbeat music) There are a few steps to
the exporting process. You may have already spent weeks crafting this masterpiece video
and it can all go wrong at the very end. There are a ton of variables
to exporting a video, and it can get very
overwhelming very quickly. To help us navigate through that, we should probably ask
ourselves these questions before we export our video. First, does this need to be the highest possible
quality export right now? Are we going to hit Publish as soon as this has done exporting? Is this a draft that
we're sending to a client that needs to be high resolution? Or is this just something
that we're gonna be sending to friends for feedback? Next, where are you posting this? Where's the video going? Which platform are you looking to post on? They all have completely
different algorithms for compressing videos. So we kind of have to plan
ahead for that process. How much time do you have? Is this something that you
can render out overnight? Do you have days? Do you have hours or are
you sitting at the airport with a very limited WiFi connection to have to get this out right away? And the final question is, how much storage space do you have? The same video that is 100 gigabytes could be compressed
down to a few gigabytes, possibly even megabytes. For instance, when we
tried out different methods of rendering and exporting
this same 10-second clip, it ranged from almost 5 1/2 gigabytes down all the way to 50 megabytes. It can eat up a ton of
storage really quickly and no website is going to host a video that is 200 gigabytes. So let's keep all of
these questions in mind as we proceed through this process. And let's take a look in
Adobe Premiere Pro right now. So here we are, in this project, you can see that we
have both a 4K sequence and a 1080P sequence. Now we're gonna be working
in the 4K sequence, but remember, it is going
to be the exact same process for a 1080P export. We will just be using
slightly different numbers near the end. So right now, we have
that 10-second drone clip in this sequence. It is a 4K clip wanting
3.976 frames per second. This is going to be our
example clip for today. As we go to Export, make sure that there's no
other clips in your sequence. If there is, just make
sure you set your in and your out point for the
section that you want to export. Then we're just gonna go up to File, Export Media, or just hit Command + M and here our export settings. It has a little preview here. It gives us exactly how
long our selected clip is and our source range. Now, as you can see, sequence
in and out is selected. That is because we set
our in and out points, but you might be exporting
an entire sequence. Those are my two most used methods. All right, so let's scroll up and let's talk about
the format of our video. The two most common
formats are gonna be H.264, which is a .MP4 file or QuickTime, which is the .MOV file. Now, what is the difference
between H.264 and QuickTime? Well, I'm glad you asked. H.264 is the most commonly
accepted compressed video file. It is our typical go-to,
it compresses our file while maintaining an
extremely high quality. Honestly, upon first glance, you might not even notice the difference between your QuickTime
and your H.264 file. That is why it is our go-to
for exporting and web hosting. But if you're gonna be creating a file that you were going to be
doing further editing to, like we did in our rendering video, QuickTime is going to
save you the most amount of editing information in it. But as you can see, it comes at the cost of a very large file size. So for the most cases, we are gonna be going with an H.264 file. So just below format is presets
and Adobe has provided a ton of different preset options for us. But the point of this
video is to understand all of our export settings, so we're gonna skip that for now. But remember to take note,
at the end of this video, we can actually save our own
presets with a single button, and then we can just select
it here for the next time. Let's talk about our output name. The output name is set to
whatever our sequence name was, but if you don't wanna name
it after your sequence, all you have to do is click on the name and then this window will pop
up where we can rename it. I'll rename this to Drone 4K. And before I hit Save,
it's also really important to know where you are
exporting this video to. Even if your sequence is properly named, I would very much consider double checking exactly where your file is going so that you don't have
to hunt for it later, then you can hit Save. Next, let's make sure our export video and export audio is selected. And then underneath it,
we have a short summary of our export settings. And now, we're gonna go
down to our video settings. As you can see, it says
basic video settings here. The first video setting
that we wanna check is gonna be the resolution of our video. If you wanna change that, all you have to do is click
on this box over here. Now, before you change it, make sure you take note of
this chain link right here. When it is activated, it's gonna keep our aspect ratio the same. So if we change one setting, it will change the other to match it. Now, if the reason that we are exporting in 24 frames per second or 23.976 is because not only is this
what I shot the footage in, but as I mentioned in my
complete guide to Adobe Premiere, the industry standard for
the Western side of the world is going to be 24 frames per second. In places like Asia, Australia, Europe, they use 25 frames per second. That's the difference
between NTSC and PAL. Some cameras will advertise
4K or ultra high definition, but they're not shooting
in a full 24 frames. They're actually only shooting in 23.976. So just make sure you check
the information on your clip before you decide to
export that frame rate. Now, there are obviously
other frame rates, you can export at a lower frame rate, but you cannot export
any higher frame rate. That will cause a stutter in
the video that you export. Also remember that you
can change the frame rate of things like text or images. I find that the motion
graphics that I export and anything with text looks better at at least 30 frames per second. If it is just motion graphics
or some sort of text element, typically, I'm going to
export in a higher frame rate, such as 30 frames per second
or 60 frames per second. It makes texts a little
bit more sharp and legible. But again, we can include
a mix of frame rates in our 24 frame per second export, and definitely make sure you
have the proper aspect ratio, which, for the most part, is
going to be a square pixel. Now, if for whatever reason, you feel like you've messed something up, thankfully, we can always go back up to our Match Source button
and with a single click, it will fix all of our problems. Well, at least it'll
match it to our sequence. Finally, there's a button down here that we do not wanna miss, which
is Render at Maximum Depth. I always recommend
rendering at maximum depth because essentially what that is gonna do is put a lot of focus on rendering our high contrast areas in our video. This is gonna be really important for avoiding things like banding in a very blue, beautiful sky, or if you've ever seen somebody filming on a solid color behind them, and you see like that
weird gradient happening, that's because there
wasn't enough bit depth. It's also gonna help us with
fast motion in our video, essentially, it just uses
more processing power and make sure our video turns
out as high quality as it can. And now let's scroll down
to our encoding settings. This is debatably the most
important part of our export. Remember, encoding is the key
step in our exporting process. Encoding is essentially
what is driving our export. It's taking the source file
and converting it into, in this case, an H.264 file with all of our preferred settings. This is going to be what
decides just the overall quality and size of our video
and how it is processed through our compression algorithm. This is controlling the
majority of our compression. So we're really gonna
gonna pay attention here. The first thing you're
gonna wanna take note on is the performance. Right now, it's set to
hardware and coding. Upon first glance, we might not
know exactly the difference. So I'm gonna try and
summarize this really quick. Hardware encoding, it's
going to be a lot faster, but for the most part, it is going to produce
a lower quality video. If you are intending on creating proxies or just quick render
files where the resolution and quality doesn't really matter, you can go with hardware encoding. It works very well for those things. But if you are trying to produce
a very high quality image, I would make sure we are going
with a software encoding. It might take a bit longer, pretty much it hands
down wins the competition in terms of the overall
processing of your video. Next, we have the profile. It sets the constraints on the parameters are exporting and are encoding, mainly around the range of our bit rate. Now, what does that even mean? It essentially tells our encoder which settings are allowed and preferred, and it will affect our
compression algorithm, so make sure you do not have this too low. So let's click on our profile
and let's talk about these. The baseline profile is very outdated. That is just for very low quality videos. We're not gonna worry
about that right now. Next, we have the main profile and that's gonna work
with standard definition. So around 720P, but now
that we're shooting in 4K and getting into the world of 8K, we should be using the high profile. It's gonna open up the opportunity for us to increase things like our bit rate, which we'll get to in a minute. Now, if you're shooting on a raw camera or a camera that records in 10 or 12 bit, and you've always wondered
how to export an HDR video, High 10 is the profile that we want. We can activate Rec. 2020 Color Primaries and then it enables us to
create the high dynamic range. So this is how we get an HDR video export. Now, if that sounded really
confusing, that's okay. If you don't know if your
camera's shooting 10-bit, your camera is probably
not shooting 10-bit. So we're gonna go back to the high profile 'cause that's gonna be
our main high definition and ultra high definition export. Now that we've set our profile, we have to change the level of parameters. And as we do this, Premiere
is gonna make an assumption of the resolution of our video
and the bit rate required. So if we change this right
now to, let's say, 2.0, it has now reduced the
resolution of our video. And then if we go all the
way up to unrestricted, Premiere is gonna assume
that we're exporting in just an insane quality. Look at the height and
width of this video. But since we're just gonna
be exporting in other 1080P, 4K or ultra high definition, we're just gonna use the
upper end and choose 5.2. Now, what did that even do? What does that number really do? Well, essentially, aside from
just changing the resolution, essentially, if we scroll down to our bit rate settings here, profile changes the parameters, which essentially means the
limit on our maximum bit rate, but what even is bit rate? Well, let's talk about it. The bit rate of your video
is essentially deciding what size and quality
of video you are making. It is the determining
factor of how many bits are encoded into your video per second. Initially, you would think, why wouldn't we just max that out? Why wouldn't we put that to the very end? We don't wanna compress our videos. Unfortunately, that's gonna leave us with a very, very large file size. So let's take a look at how the bit rate affects the size of the
video that we're exporting, switched our encoding setting to CBR just to make this a little
bit easier to understand. Let's go over to our target bit rate and let's change this
to something like two. It's gonna leave us with a file size of around two megabytes. But if we max it out around
240 megabit per second, the file size is gonna
jump up to 286 megabytes, essentially 150 times bigger, and that size of bit rate
is not even necessary. This video does not have
enough information for that. But how do we even determine
what size of bit rate we need? Now, remember different platforms have different file size requirements. For instance, YouTube's
maximum upload size is 128 gigabytes, but if
you're working with Vimeo and you just have a basic account, you can only upload a maximum
of 500 megabytes in one week. So there is a drastic difference there and this is gonna be pretty much the main tool to combat that. Now, if you have no idea
what to set your bit rate to, this is where the links in
my description come in handy. So let's go back to the
YouTube recommendations. So as we can see, it's
looking for an MP4 file, a video codec of H.264, and the bit rate for a 4K video is gonna be somewhere between 35 and 68 megabits per second. So for instance, if we
went and we export it at 10 megabits per second, we would be doing such a
massive disservice to our video. We have so much room to
work with and add quality, especially with a 128
gigabyte upload limit, so we might as well use a higher bit rate. At the end of the day, YouTube is going to
compress your video anyway, so I would usually go above the maximum recommended bit rate. So for instance, we could even export at 80 megabits per second. Now, when we go to set our bit rate, there are three different ways about going about bit rate and encoding. Right now we have CBR, that
stands for constant bit rate. Essentially, you choose
a number and your video is going to set it 100% of the
time to be at this bit rate. Now that sounds pretty good, but it is possible to have too
high of a bit rate setting. Like you wouldn't order clothes
that are too big for you, just because they have more
material, essentially, you know. You don't have the information to be filling that extra space. So that's why we have
other alternatives here. Aside from CBR, we have
VBR, 1-pass and 2-pass. VBR stands for variable bit rate. So let's click on 1-pass for now. As you can see, the variable
bit rate has a target bit rate and a maximum bit rate. So what we wanna do here
is set our target bit rate within the range that we're looking for, and then set our maximum
bit rate a lot higher. And essentially, what it's gonna do is it's gonna go for the maximum bit rate and those scenes that really need it, those scenes with high
contrast, fast movements. But for the most part,
it's gonna try and keep it around our target bit rate to be most efficient with our file size. Now, the 1-pass versus the 2-pass. The variable 1-pass is going
to essentially make a guess on how to encode your video on the fly. Whereas the 2-pass actually goes through the entire video
first and analyzes it, and then it makes the proper
adjustments on the second pass. Now that sounds great. That is what I would typically
recommend for your export. If you can, if you have the time. Obviously, if it's gonna
be doing a second pass, that means it is going to
take up to twice as long to render your video. If this is your final output, I would highly recommend
going with the VBR 2-pass. The constant bit rate is great in terms of maintaining a standard. If you know exactly what you
want your bit rate to be, constant bit rate is not
necessarily a bad option. So if you're just exporting single clips and it's something you're
gonna be editing in the future, I have a lot of text and
graphics that I reuse. So if I'm gonna be editing with them again and I'm gonna be storing them, and I'm gonna be using
them multiple times, I'll export those at a constant bit rate and keep it as a relatively large file. But if you're using multiple cameras, if you have scenes that vary
in complexity of the shot and you have the time to render, I would suggest going with
the variable bit rate 2-pass. This way, our file will
be an appropriate size, it will still have a
really high resolution and a very good render and compression for the complex scenes that need it. So again, choose your bit rate either based on the recommended upload from each website or depending on the file size that you need. My go-to is going to be the VBR 2-pass, to get a compressed file
that is very high quality. Essentially, with the maximum bit rate, you're kinda covering all of your ground and your high contrast areas
with a very high bit rate. And of course, it's gonna keep your file size more realistic. So if you have the time do the 2-pass, but if you don't have a lot of time, you don't know the exact bit rate you should be exporting at,
1-pass is always a good option. And finally, let's make sure we use the maximum render quality. This is very important for projects where you use different types of cameras, or if you're upscaling or
downscaling your footage. It creates a lot of harmony
between your footage. I would say it is definitely worth the slight increase in export time. It is something that I
would always recommend. Now let's go and check out
our Audio tab for our export. Again, this is something we can go and check these websites for
for their recommendations. So let's go back to YouTube real quick. As we can see their
preferred audio codec is AAC, channels of stereo or stereo 5.1 and a sample rate of
at least 48,000 Hertz. As you can see, we
already have AAC selected as our audio format, our
sample rate is 48,000. If you're not exactly sure what
your audio was recorded in, all you have to do is
go back to your project, select your audio, and then
go over to the info tab. So for channels, we're
just gonna go for stereo. We're not doing a surround sound 5.1. And for our audio quality, we're always gonna leave that at high. There's a very small
difference in file size between a high and low audio quality. So let's just always make
sure we leave that at high. In terms of our bit rate settings, I'm always gonna set it around 320. Now it's gonna vary from
platform to platform, some web streaming services
only have 60 for the bit rate. I know SoundCloud is
somewhere between 60 and 96. Other web hosting it like
Spotify, for example, it goes between 128 and 160, but I mean, we have this information, we might as well export it
at our highest bit rate. It's really not gonna
affect our file size much. And then let's make sure
we're going by our bit rate and not our sample rate for our export. Finally, if you've rendered your video and you've watched it over
and you think it's good to go and you're very happy with it, you can actually publish it as soon as it's done exporting
through Premiere Pro. So let's go over to the Publish tab. There are a ton of different accounts that you can log into, Adobe
Creative Cloud, Behance, Facebook, Twitter, Vimeo, YouTube. You can sign into any of these profiles and you can have your video uploaded as soon as you're done exporting. In all honesty, I'm an
extreme perfectionist and every time I export a video, I have to watch the entire
thing through over and over. It doesn't matter if it's
a 70-minute tutorial. I know that I'm typically
gonna find a small error in my video and I'm gonna have to go and make another draft for it. It's very rare that I'm confident enough to just publish straight out of Premiere. So if you're like me and you know that you're probably going
to be having multiple drafts of your video before you approve of it, I have a method that is most
efficient for working this way. That's in the rendering video. I managed to change my
export from 3 1/2 hours down to seven minutes. If you're interested in that, or you make a bunch of
different drafts of your video, and if you think that'd be
beneficial to your workflow, I would definitely recommend
going to check that out. And finally, there are two different ways that we can export our video,
let's scroll down here. As you can see, we have the word queue and we have the word export here. If you wanna export instantaneously through Adobe Premiere Pro,
we can just click Export, but if we hit Queue, it'll
add it to Media Encoder. So for the sake of this
video, let's click on that. If you've never export it through Encoder, it's actually an amazing program and could be super
helpful for your process. The only main drawback would
be that it's a little bit slow to open up, and yeah, I mean, like it just takes a little bit longer. This program is really amazing. There are so many benefits to it. So as you can see, we have
queued our first render, but if you're looking to export
your video multiple times or make different versions of it, all we have to do is go
and right click our file, and we can duplicate it right here. And then if we wanna
change the settings on it, all we have to do is
either click on the H.264 or our custom preset, and it will open up our export settings from Premiere. So let's also export a 1080P version. I'll change the dimensions on this file, and then I'll rename it to 1080 Drone. We're gonna keep all the other settings and we're just gonna hit OK. If you're exploiting for 1080P, just make sure you go back to those assets and you see what the
recommended bit rate is for uploads of that resolution. Because aside from the dimensions, the only thing that is gonna
change is the bit rate. Now, it's gonna export
both a 4K and a 1080P. I'm just gonna quickly rename this one, and it's very much just
like our Premiere exporting. Now, here is a pro tip for you. If you're gonna be using this method, let's go up to Media Encoder
and click on the Preferences. Remember we hit Queue Export, so that doesn't mean start export. Sometimes, I'll send it to Media Encoder and you walk away, you go
do whatever you have to do, thinking that your video is now exporting, but you never hit Start and
it's just been sitting there for like the last couple of hours. With a click of a button, we
can have them start exporting as soon as they enter the program, and we can either have it start right away by setting this to zero minutes, or we can set it to one minute in case we wanna change some settings or duplicate our export. Either way, I would just make sure you have that box selected
with whatever timeframe you wanna put there. This program is really amazing. We can start our render
and go back to Premiere and continue editing, whether it's the next
version of this video or a completely different video. Now, obviously, if we're
using our computer to edit, it's gonna slow down our exports slightly, but just the idea and the fact
that we can even use this, I think is incredible, especially if you're
just making small changes and alternative exports, or if we're creating
render files like proxies, Media Encoder is an
insanely helpful program, or if we just wanna use Premiere, we can go down to export
and start that instantly. We have this currently set to 2-pass. So as you can see, it's doing
its first pass out of two. Now, if you're looking
to export this video for another platform such
as Instagram or TikTok, or you're just looking
to do a vertical video, I have an entire video dedicated
to exactly that process. Not only do we talk about how
to properly crop your video for these platforms, but also how to properly
export for these platforms, because I know we're
all tired of our videos looking so good until we hit Upload. Invest a few minutes to
make sure that your videos are being posted at the absolute
highest possible quality that they can be. Throughout this video, I'd know I've used the word render quite a bit, and we briefly brought
up that there's a method to making your exports 25 times faster. If you spend a couple
of hours editing a video for there to be a tiny flaw, there are a couple of
workaround methods for this, so that you do not have
to spend hours again. That is all done through
pre-rendering your files. Now, if you think the
pre-rendering method would help you or you're not 100% sure what that even is, I would highly recommend
investing a few minutes in watching that video. Like I said, it brought
my 3 1/2 hour export down to seven minutes and
that has now saved me days. I used to have to export overnight, and now I can just export it
within a couple of minutes while I go grab a coffee, but I know it has shameless
self-promotion, so whatever. Either way, I truly hope
that this helped you out. If you have any questions, feel free to drop them in the comments. And if this was helpful,
smash that subscribe button, show that support and love. Now don't forget to go
back and save these presets so that the next time
you go to export a video of a similar style, all
you have to do is click a single button instead of going through and watching this entire video again. You can make presets for
literally whatever you want, make a preset for each different platform you're uploading to or
each different resolution, save yourself that time,
and that is all for today. Thank you guys for watching,
I will catch up with you soon.
