Welcome to Tool Tip Tuesday for Adobe Premiere Pro on ProVideo Coalition

Most of this, you probably shouldn’t use 2-pass encoding, and you should know exactly what your hardware does.

I have these tips this week, and yes, I can come up with exceptions for each.

Tip #1: Larger is Actually Better

The old obsession with tiny file sizes is (mostly) dead.

All the platforms are going to recompress your work. Just don’t give them damaged files to start with. So yes, uploading ProRes to YouTube is allowed.

When in doubt with H. 264/HEVC, up the data rate. The key reason I’d use either of those codecs is that uploading ProRes actually takes some time

.

Tip #2: Hardware Compression + Larger Files = Faster Workflow

Software compression is technically superior because it doesn’t aim for real-time performance. It takes way more time to analyze every frame for optimal quality. But that’s precisely why it’s often the wrong choice.

Hardware encoding leverages dedicated chips in your CPU or GPU designed specifically for video compression. You’ll notice your main processor isn’t maxed out during exports—that’s the specialized chips doing their job. The result? Much faster encoding. MUCH.

Make sure that if you play with the settings for H. h264/HEVC, Hardware encoding stays active.

The real tip in this article? Adobe makes it very clear when you break the hardware encoding of your system. 

Just know the hardware encoding choice only shows up for H. 264/HEVC settings.

Technical note #1: Intel, AMD, and nVidia haven’t made it easy to figure out what they do/don’t support on a chip by chip basis. Go google ‘Intel quicksync’ and your Intel processor if you want to see what I mean.

Technical note #2: Apple has H265/HVEC and ProRes hardware encoding chips on their Silicon systems. It’s crazy fast. But you’ll see no indication that it’s doing its job. It is.

Truth #3: Two-Pass needs to go. It’s Only Worth It When Going Really Small

This was the real genesis of the article. That over on Reddit, somebody mentioned two-pass encoding.

Two-pass encoding analyzes your footage twice to optimize quality at extremely low bitrates. But here’s the thing: Most of us aren’t shooting for small, merely looking good.

Whether you’re delivering to YouTube/Vimeo/IG, they will all recompress anyway.

And two-pass breaks hardware encoding. It’s why it doesn’t show up for HEVC – that the encoding times in software are ridiculous.

Last thoughts on encoding in Premiere

Adobe does a great job with their presets.

If you’re going to tweak anything, start with one of their presets. Keep your eye on the hardware vs. software encoding to ensure you don’t break Export larger files using hardware encoding, accept the minor quality trade-off, and bank the time savings.

Bonus tip: Exporting while in Premiere is faster than going to Adobe Media Encoder. It’s tying up maximum resources.

Your deadline will thank you, your clients won’t notice the difference, and platforms will recompress everything anyway.

Fast and good enough beats slow and perfect. Your hardware encoder exists to break the bottleneck—use it.

P.S. Ask whatever compression problems you have here and I’ll do my best to keep up!

This series is courtesy of Adobe.