I even went back and re-exported the file to make sure that all my settings were in place – including checking off ‘Use Maximum Render Quality’, but still I had the same poor results. It was blocky, over compressed, and even the colors seemed a bit off.

On a recent project of mine though, I noticed that when using my standard H.264 settings in Adobe Premiere Pro the result of the final product didn’t look quite right. This was especially true up until one of the more recent FCP X updates which seemed to have improved the render and output performance noticeably… But nonetheless because of this difference in speed I got into a habit of compressing my long format video files with Premiere or Adobe Media Encoder (even if I was cutting in FCP X), simply because it was faster. While my preference for straight up editing has largely leaned towards FCP X, I also use Premiere Pro all the time which led me to notice that exports from Premiere Pro generally seemed to be faster than exports from FCP X. Like many filmmakers today, I use a number of different NLE’s and post tools on a daily basis as every project has different needs and requirements. There have been certain settings that have worked really well for me over the years with regards to H.264 compression, but it wasn’t until this year that I noticed a staggering difference in the final quality of the files that I would output from Premiere Pro as opposed to FCP X. I’ve always been really picky when it comes to compressing my video files (especially for web), because the image quality of the final product can be made or broken at this stage.

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