How to Edit HEVC H.265 Smoothly in Premiere Pro

🔽 Play HEVC with Media Player Classic ~ https://bit.ly/32m8VS6
🔽 Convert files with VideoProc Converter ~ https://bit.ly/3zMWz8n
🔽 Download the K-Lite codec pack ~ https://cutt.ly/Lfccgte
🔽 HEVC video extension for Windows ~ https://bit.ly/3g6SNKz

This tutorial for editing H.265 or HEVC video files in Adobe Premiere assumes you're having problems playing and managing this format, so let's look at how to solve it. We have a Canon XF705 which is a great camera with lovely picture quality, 4k UHD resolution, 50 frames per second, 10 bit, 422 and it uses the HEVC format.

One recorded minute of video will give you a files size of around 1GB. If you compare this to other formats like DNxHD 440 you’ll get a file around 3.4GB and ProRes HQ will be in the region of 9GB, so this format gives you vastly smaller files.

If we forget Premiere for the moment, one of the first problems you're likely to come up against is a lack of thumbnail images. Now, this is typical of the MXF wrapper format but it doesn’t make life with H.265 any easier.

Playing these HEVC files isn’t easy either and most media players will not play these files and installing the Canon software didn’t have the effect I was hoping for.

For many years I have relied on VLC Media Player to cope with exotic video formats, but this time was the exception and I was running out of options.

I’m a MacBook user too so I thought I’d see if MacOS would bring me some joy seeing as so many Mac users always bang on about how Macs ‘just work’, but after trying VLC Media Player, Elmedia Player, 5KPlayer and
QuickTime nothing worked so the MacBook was cast aside.

Eventually, I got the files to play with a new version of a familiar media player, Media Player Classic. Initially, I thought this media player had been abandoned but it seems someone has taken the project on and V1.9.1 did the job just fine and it’s actually a great app because it loads really quickly and will play anything.

Now although I couldn't find any media player that would work on the Mac, you must remember I'm talking about playing the files outside Adobe Premiere, so once you are in your editing environment you’ll be able to see your footage, even if you can’t play it smoothly.

In an ideal world, you'd bring your HEVC footage into Premiere and it would playback nice and smoothly but when attempting to play anything H265 it grinds to a halt after 2 or 3 seconds.

Before creating proxy files you need to be aware of an audio bug. If you modify your audio channel settings before creating proxies it can cause the audio and waveforms to disappear when in proxy mode.

I like to use the Apple ProRes 422 Proxy preset because it gives you a much smaller file size than the Cineform GoPro codec. So once you’ve chosen your proxy mode it will send the encode job over to Adobe Media Encoder and start automatically.

When the proxy encoding is complete, Premiere should be aware of the new proxy files and once you’ve enabled proxy mode with the toggle switch you'll notice the scrubbing performance is super smooth and you can edit without any stuttering assuming you have a half-decent PC.

Proxy editing might not be ideal but I’m certain this is something we as editors will only have to suffer for a couple of years at most because CPUs, GPUs and software will get better, faster, stronger as Daft Punk once said.

The H.265 format was introduced in 2013 and one of the reasons that has taken so long to become a popular codec for content creators is licensing issues with three different licenses involved so this has pushed a lot of big companies like Apple, Google, Microsoft and Netflix into joining the Alliance for Open Media who are working on a royalty-free version called AV1 so maybe we'll be using this in the future.

#AdobePremiere #HEVC #H265

00:00 Intro
00:20 File sizes
00:45 Media players
01:41 Start
02:05 Audio bug
03:03 Creating proxies
06:31 Encoding times
07:02 AV1 codec
07:15 Final thoughts

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