How to Export Smaller Files and Better Quality Video from Premiere Pro Using HEVC/H.265

In this lesson on from David Bode’s free course, Ultimate Premiere Pro FAQ, you will learn how to export your projects using the successor to H.264: H.265.


H.265, or High Efficiency Video Coding, is 25 to 50% more efficient. This means you can have the size of a file and you’re going to get better quality or you can have the same quality at a much smaller file size. 

Export Your Project

In the same way you export other projects from Premiere, you can have your sequence selected either from the timeline or from the project panel, and use the keyboard shortcut Control-M to to Menu >  Export > Media.  

When the dialogue box opens, choose HEVC (H.265) from the drop down menu.

Once you’ve chosen HEVC (H. 265), you can probably get away with using some of the presets. So, if your is HD, you can choose the HD preset, and you’ll see you’ll get a very standard sort of resolution, although you can change that if you like.

You’ll see many different options under the Video Tab. For example, you can decide what level you want to encode at. This is something that you’re going to want to check if you are uploading to a specific platform. 

Now if you haven’t checked out some of the options in Adobe Media Encoder—this is just the exporter—there are a lot more options than there used to be in terms of the Effects controls, because now you can apply LUTS, a video limiter, a loudness normalisation—going through all of the settings would be its own mini course, but you can explore what all of those options. The option worth mentioning here is the option for Hardware Encoding, which is fast and effective, if you have the hardware for it.

So once you are ready to go, select the output Name and Output  > Queue. This will to send you over to Adobe Media Encoder.

If you need to make any other adjustments, once you over to the Encoder, you can click on the preset in the dialogue window. Otherwise, just click the green play button to start encoding. Having that hardware encoder option enabled will make things move a lot faster. 

Bear in that using H.265 requires a powerful , so this is not what you want to use if you are sending your projects to someone to add motion graphics, colour correction, or just to edit into a larger sequence. For that, you want to use an intermediate codec, which we cover in our export guide:

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