Premiere Pro December 2024 (25.1) update with H.264 enhancements

Adobe’s December 3rd, 2024 update December 2024 (25.1) is out. Check out the new features.

Rounded Corner Design for timeline clips, which is neither here nor there, though can be annoying for key frames.

Enhanced H.264 performance on Apple Ailicon and Windows: Upnto 4x increase in performance on Apple Silicon and 2x performance on Windows! Always welcome! Personally I tend to recomoress H.264 to ProRES for performance, but that isn’t possible with many online working methods, so this is certainly welcome.

And these fixes:

AUDIO:

  • The audio was not imported for MXF files with 32-bit audio.
  • The Progress panel sometimes showed duplicated “Enhancing Speech” processes.
  • Newly created Audio Tracks did not respect the Solo state of other tracks.
  • Attributes would not be correctly pasted across all audio channels of a clip on the timeline.
  • Clicking on a clip badge to open the Effect Controls or Essential Sound panels would open the panels on the mouse down.
  • Premiere Pro would sometimes crash when disabling Enhance Speech during processing on nested sequences.

CAPTIONS

  • When importing a custom caption preset which was previously saved with a certain style, the “Style” option could erroneously be reset to “None“.
  • Undoing a merge of multiple captions segments would not select all segments.

‘EDITING

  • The Time Ruler Numbers option for Timeline was disabled, and the shortcut did not work.
  • Some EDLs would fail to import.
  • The Progress Sheet was not docked with other panels when opened from the Windows menu.
  • Premiere Pro would hang when exporting some projects to XML.
  • Get Media File Properties for > Selectionwas disabled for Timeline clips.
  • Option or Alt + mouse wheel would not zoom the Timeline based on the cursor location.
  • Scaling below 50% of a still image in a timeline, when played in non-high quality, half or quarter resolution, could cause the image position to shift.

EFFECTS

  • Applying Morph Cut via an Adjustment Layer could cause a crash.
  • Crash observed when opening Old Premiere Pro (22.x) project containing Morph Cuteffect.
  • Some projects using the Morph Cuttransition could crash when using the GPU-accelerated renderer.

FORMATS

  • Observed artifacts during reverse playback of AVC Long GOP MXF media.
  • [Regression 24.4] Adaptive bit rate presets (High/Medium/low) under the video setting were showing the same bit rate during Export.
  • Disabling the hardware-accelerated decode preference did not work for ProRes media—playback would still use hardware acceleration with this option disabled.

MARKERS

  • Duplicate Frame Markers were not displayed on clips at minimum track height.
  • Duplicate Frame Marker colors could be out of order.
  • Delete gap in Timeline could result in Duplicate Frame Markers disappearing from other clips equal to the duration of the deleted Timeline.
  • When you drag a clip to the Timeline, different clips may have the same Duplicate Frame Marker color until you force update.
  • Duplicate frame indicators, clip markers, and clip ends could jitter when the timeline is scrolled while playing.

TEAM PROJECTS

  • Read-only sequences from Media Browserallowed changes to be made.

TEXT-BASED EDITING

  • Clip markers could sometimes not show or be added to audio-only clips in the Transcript tab of the Text panel.
  • With a project set to Read Only, it could be possible to drag markers in the Text panel’s Transcript.
  • Importing a corrected transcript could result in a timecode mismatch.
  • When working with English transcripts, the first word of a sentence could erroneously start with a lowercase letter.

Pro Video Coalitions Ian Anderson has a great article on ProRes

Iain Anderson at Pro Video Coalition has a must read article on Why ProRes?

Luckily ProRes has become pretty standard across my editing. Most cameras can record to it, and it works great, with so little processing power. Personally I don’t even like bringing any MP4’s in, and convert even them to ProRes Proxy.

Of course now with a Blackmagicdesign 6k Pro I have been shooting BlackMagic RAW and it in 6K certainly seems to take more processing power than ProRes, but it is also more compressed.

I would like to see how the M1 processors can handle H.264, which might mean less recompressing. I just see standardizing on a format to make Premiere work more like AVID, which has always been the most stable editing system.

ProVideoCoalition on should you be uploading 4K Video to YouTube

Nick Lear at the ProVideoCoalition has a must read article on if you should upload 4K video to YouTube.

I do love that since YouTube re-compressed everything you should basically upload in your editing format, since they don’t have upload limits like Vimeo. It is pretty funny that Adobe Media Encoder’s YouTube settings are H.264, but I guess it saves your bandwidth.

H.266 is coming out and like H.265 does the same quality at half the data rate

So the H.266 video compression standard has been announced, and just like H.265 it again cuts the data rate by half while keeping the same quality, which is very impressive.

And this will be great for video streaming and camera compression and the like, but once again it is going to be very processor intensive, and from what I have seen not many people are even using H.265 because it is so processor intensive both on compression side and playback side, and H.266 will be so much more processor intensive.

Better compression for video is always a good thing, but it will be a while before anyone sees any benefits from this.

An argument against Xeon Processors, QuickSync and H.264 Compression

Mac Performance Guide has a new test showing a MacBook Pro vs a MacPro doing h.264 encoding. The MacPro has a consumer CPU which has QuickSync. Now you have to do specific encoder settings to get this result, but it clearly shows the MacPro being thoroughly beat by the MacBookPro!

It is pretty idiotic that Intel would actual have better features in their consumer chips than their much more expensive professional Xeon chips! Really for most uses the Xeon is really best because you can have more cores and you can have dual processors, but since you can get higher core i7 chips now, maybe a hackintosh with a Core i7 would be better in many circumstances!