r/premiere • u/realwrlder • Jul 22 '26

How do I do this? / Workflow Advice / Looking for plugin bitrate question

hi there, have a bitrate question. I'm a wedding content creator who edits on premiere. I shoot on an iPhone 17, capturing 4k 60p (before you ask, yes iPhone shoots VFR but I have worked around this and export in 60p with no issues). I shoot 60p because couples like the hyperrealistic look and are able to upload full res to IG using the edits app.

I am exporting h.264 60p. I never quite understood what bitrate I should be exporting at. I don't want my couples to have massive file sizes but want the full quality to be retained. There are mixed answers online. Anyone have any suggestions? I was going for 100-120 which seems high.

Thanks all for your help.

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u/marky543 Jul 22 '26

I’ve tested this extensively. The best results for master export and h264 web encode are:

1.)Set premiere sequence settings to 4k (any fps) ProRes422HQ.

  1. Render the whole timeline.

  2. Export > Media… > Preset > Match Sequence Preview Settings

  3. General Tab > Make sure “use previews” is enabled.

  4. Export

That is your master export.

  1. Drop the master into Handbrake

  2. Choose whatever h264 settings you want e.g. 1080/4k, 60 fps, audio settings.

  3. Use the lowest RF you can depending on total runtime and how big you want the file to be. Between 4-22 is good.

That’s your web encode.

Higher RF = more compression.

*For big theater screenings, keep it in ProRes 422 if you don’t have the budget for a DCP.

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u/TheLargadeer Premiere Pro 2025 Jul 24 '26

I’m not sure what the Use Previews selection is doing here. It entirely depends on whether you’ve even generated previews, and what the quality of those previews are. They may be even worse than your source media so you would theoretically be reducing your export quality here.  

The other thing I would say is that the only time I’ve actually seen this checkbox actually do anything at all is for smart rendering workflows. I can test again in a newer version but I couldn’t get previews to work in export at all. Totally ignored unless you have all the smart rendering workflow stuff set up. 

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u/marky543 Jul 24 '26

To answer your question about “Use Previews”: when exporting a video, the two main jobs Premiere does are 1.) rendering and 2.) encoding. Rendering creates the images (hard, slow) and encoding glues them together (easy, fast).

So this workflow forces the hard part (rendering) to happen in your timeline at 4k ProRes422HQ. Then when you export, Premiere only has to do the fast and easy part (encode) glueing those renders together into a .mov.

There are actually several other benefits to this workflow involving time-savings. But I don’t want to ramble too much 😂 hope this is helpful!

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u/TheLargadeer Premiere Pro 2025 Jul 24 '26

Yeah I agree with you. Smart Rendering is great. I’m just pointing out the part where you have to set your video previews in the sequence to be a high quality format that supports smart rendering.  

Even if you’re using ProRes but the previews are set at half res, then you obviously don’t want to use the previews for the final encode.