A Few Questions about Optimizing Premiere Pro for Editing & Exporting 1080p24 Film Projects and Blu-ray

Karl Lee · November 30, 2014

Hi everyone.

These questions may be better suited for a NLE or Adobe Premiere forum, but we have some pretty knowledgeable members here, so I thought I'd see if anyone might be able to offer some advice.

I have a couple of S16 film transfers that were mastered as ProRes422 HQ files and will soon have a ProRes4444 file from a film scan (all of which are 1080p @ 23.98 FPS). I'd like to start doing some editing in (OS X) Premiere Pro CS6, but first I'd like to make sure that I've optimized Premiere to preserve the progressive video and prevent Premiere from applying some type of pulldown, and also make sure that I'm preserving the progressive scanning and overall quality of the original transfer when selecting an export format.

Premiere Pro has a number of sequence presets when opening a new project, but as far as I could tell none of the presets were really optimized for editing a 1080p24 ProRes file, so I created a custom preset as shown below. Do the project settings below appear to be correct for editing a 1080p24 clip?

Additionally, Premiere Pro has two pulldown schemes ("repeat frame" and "interlaced frame") which can be applied to 24p clips so they play at 29.97 FPS. This is something I don't want enabled, but as far as I can tell, this option is enabled only for projects based on an NTSC frame rate. Since I've set my projects for 23.97 FPS, I don't believe I have to worry about this option being enabled. When viewing the "modify clip" for one of the clips in my project, for example, note that the "Remove 24p pulldown" option is grayed out...

Finally, when selecting an export format, I'd like to keep the rendered file as close to the original as possible. Assuming my original file is a ProRes4444 file and I'd like to keep the same format for the file export, do these export settings appear to be correct?

Assuming that my editing sequence consists of only ProRes4444 files (and not a mixture of ProRes 4444, ProRes 422, or other formats), and my export is configured for ProRes4444, is Premiere "smart" enough to pass along any portion of the video timeline not modified by a transition or filter straight to the output file without any transcoding, or are all source files usually transcoded to conform exactly to the export settings?

Finally, if at some point I wanted to burn my project to Blu-ray, is ProRes (either 422 or 4444) a suitable file format for authoring a Blu-ray disc, or does a more compressed format with a smaller file size generally work better? Conventional wisdom would be to author a disc using the highest quality source file available, but in terms of transcoding and rendering time, I'm not sure if using a ProRes source file is necessarily the most practical choice. Also, when burning 1080p24 content to a Blu-ray disc, is it generally better to start with a 1080i60 file and have the pulldown rendered by the editing software, or stick with 1080p24 and leave the 3:2 pulldown to the Blu-ray player?

Lots of questions here, so thanks to anyone who can help!

Phil Rhodes · November 30, 2014

Looks reasonable, although I've only ever used Premiere under Windows so I've never done a ProRes export (at least, not directly). That said, it's all more or less the same thing, regardless of codec. Operating at a single frame rate throughout is usually the simplest approach.

ProRes is a perfectly decent precursor to a blu-ray. The blu-ray authoring software will downconvert it to (usually) h.264. You can probably master the blu-ray from the same file as everything else. Blu-ray supports 24p material directly.

P