Premier Pro Optimal Render Setting?

JoshK · October 16, 2014

I just started using premier pro and I render out a video at 1080p at 16 bit color and I dont know anything about video rendering or premier pro for that matter but which codec should I be using and what are the optimal setting for a video to render out 1920x1080 at 16 bit color and come out at a moderate file size? I dont care about render times because I have patience and I am willing to wait for a good quality render. On top of that I am going to be uploading it to Youtube so since youtube compression is terrible and makes the video come out like crap how can I optimize my video to look the best?

Enderman · October 16, 2014

AVI is the best, but it makes huge files that will take you days to upload to youtube unless you have gigabit internet.

linkbattler · October 19, 2014

Render in H.264.

See the attached for my render settings. Its based on a youtube video "YouTube Compression - The battle for quality with slow internet." ,but I made several adjustments.
You may wanna tick "Render at maximum depth" and maximum render quality" and change Bitrate encoding to VBR 2 Passes.

Unless Youtube re-encodes videos to Webm/.VP9 (Only for videos with high view counts I observe, I could be wrong), videos with low view count will be stuck with mp4/.avc (which looks like crap as you said).
Imo, due to Youtube sucky compression for mp4/.avc , I have yet to see any differences between 8Mbps and 30Mbps bitrates.

Examples of my recent videos rendered in this setting