Highest Quality Export from PP CS6

[Bjørn Sørensen]

What setting gives the highest quality export from 1080 25p in Premiere Pro CS6 Windows ?
The output is intended as a master output for archival.

[Harm Millaard]

Uncompressed.

[John Kemper]

The AVI (Uncompressed) format choice is the highest quality choice for coming out of premiere. However, it is not necessarily the right choice for you.

You say these are for archival purposes. Is there a possibility of these videos needing to be edited more in the future? If not, the uncompressed format may be more than you need.

If the purpose is sheer archival, I would look into a regular high quality AVI or Quicktime (they will not only be smaller, but more compatible with different machines, both now and into the future) or a high quality h264 if you need to keep hard drive space in mind.

All three of these can render out HD video and no viewer will really be able to tell the difference (unless they are a seasoned professional, who has spent more time looking at compressed video than the back of their hand).

Uncompressed is usually used as an intermediate format, to render out a video from one editing program to be brought into another. (premiere to after effects or speedgrade or something). However, as Adobe introduces more and more dynamic linking and integration these formats have become less useful for some one who stays entirely within the CS environment.

[Bjørn Sørensen]

Thanks to both of you! I will make some experiments based on these answers.

Bjorn

[Sareesh Sudhakaran]

Uncompressed TIFF sequence, 16 bit.