I'm new to video encoding. I have accumulated over 40 years of home videos from Super 8 to 4k and I would to preseve the quality of these videos while using Premiere Pro CC (v2020 or later) for video editing.
What is the best workflow for 1080p and 4k videos with Premiere? For 1080p, for example, I would like to merge several clips together as one MagicYUV avi file and edit them in Premiere. Each of these clips could be 5 seconds long up to over 30 minutes. Should I:
1. Encode each clip individually to MagicYUV avi and merge these avi files Premiere again using MagicYUV codec to create the big avi.
2. Drag all the raw clips in Premiere timeline and encode them using MagicYUV to create the big avi file. These clips are in various video formats - MOV, AVI, or MP4 etc.
What is the best setting in MagicYUV to achieve this? All of them are 8-bit files. Should I use YUV 4:2:2 in MagicYUV setting to create the avi? RGB? If I use 4:2:0, will that still preserve the quality of the original file and is it still lossless?
Thanks in advance.
By the way, the reason for asking about the Premiere workflow above is because MagicYUV does now show under File > Project Manager in Premiere. It only shows under File > Export > Media which does not help much when archiving files using an intermediate codec.
Hi,
Sorry for the late reply, I usually answer right away but I somehow missed the topic.
I'm not that knowledgeable about Premiere workflows, so I can't really give useful advice here. I think both approaches can work. I don't know what File -> Project Manager is for and how does it work, but I presume you mean "Consolidate and transcode", and I assume it only shows codecs that are managed by Adobe. The MagicYUV plugin for Premiere is an import/export plugin, and hence only shows up in File -> Export -> Media.
Regarding color space, it depends on what the source material format/color space is. It has to be decided on a per file basis. If some are RGB, then RGB is needed to preserve all information, if some are YUV 4:2:0, then that is enough also as encode format. The safest bet of course is RGB, but that's gonna result in larger files.
The difference between the formats is subsampling (reduction of "color" information). 4:4:4 subsampling has all color information, 4:2:2 has color halved horizontally, 4:2:0 has color halved both horizontally and vertically (so effectively quartered), you can look up a more detailed explanation on the internet about the difference between YUV 4:4:4/4:2:2/4:2:0. For example: all videos on youtube use 4:2:0 subsampling. This can be detrimental in some cases, especially in red colored areas (find a video on youtube with lots of red light/colors in it and you'll see that those areas will look severely washed out compared to different colored areas, like green), and the reason for this is that red color tends to be stored as color only (with little luma contribution), and as color is quartered and also more heavily compressed by h264 (especially reds, as human eyes are "supposedly" less sensitive to that), it ends up blurry/blocky/washed out.
Hope that helps some, feel free to ask if you have further questions.
