Runner / Fixes

Premiere Pro and AV1.

AV1 is now everywhere, and Premiere still cannot read it. This page explains what is actually happening, how to tell if AV1 is your problem, and which conversion to use for which job.

What AV1 is, and why it keeps appearing

AV1 is a modern, royalty-free video codec. It compresses substantially better than H.264, which is exactly why the companies paying for bandwidth adopted it quickly. It is excellent for delivery and awkward for editing.

You are most likely to run into it from:

• YouTube, especially above 1080p. The most common source by a distance. Lower resolutions are likelier to offer H.264, but not reliably: 1080p downloads come back VP9 or AV1 often enough that you cannot assume.
• Microsoft Clipchamp exports.
• Newer screen recorders and streaming tools with AV1 encoding turned on.
• Recent GPUs, where AV1 encoding is now a default option in OBS and similar tools.
• Anything encoded with libaom-av1 or SVT-AV1.

How to tell whether AV1 is your problem

Two symptoms point at it almost every time:

1. The clip imports and you get audio but no picture, or Premiere rejects the file entirely.
2. The very same file plays perfectly in VLC, Windows Media Player, or a browser.

To be certain:

ffprobe -v error -select_streams v:0 -show_entries stream=codec_name -of csv=p=0 "yourfile.mp4"

av1 or av01 confirms it.

Converting it properly

For normal editing — H.264

ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -c:v libx264 -crf 18 -preset slow \
       -pix_fmt yuv420p -c:a aac -b:a 192k output.mp4

Fast enough, small enough, and Premiere has read it forever. Use this unless you have a reason not to.

For colour grading — DNxHR or ProRes

ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -c:v dnxhd -profile:v dnxhr_hq \
       -pix_fmt yuv422p -c:a pcm_s16le output.mov

Far more resilient through a grade. Expect files several times larger, and make sure you have the disk space before you start a batch.

Converting a whole folder

for %f in (*.webm) do ffmpeg -i "%f" -c:v libx264 -crf 18 ^
    -pix_fmt yuv420p -c:a aac "converted_%~nf.mp4"

That is Windows cmd. In PowerShell the loop syntax differs, and in bash you would use for f in *.webm; do ... done.

Things that do not work

• Renaming the extension. .webm to .mp4 changes the container label, not the codec inside. Premiere still cannot decode it.
• Rewrapping without re-encoding. -c:v copy keeps the AV1 stream exactly as it was. You must actually re-encode the video.
• Generating proxies. Premiere has to decode the source to build one, which is the step that fails.
• Updating Premiere. The import failure has been reported on the newest releases, and AV1 decoding is still an open request on Adobe's forum.

If this happens to you weekly

Converting by hand is fine occasionally. It stops being fine when it is part of your daily routine, because the real cost is not the conversion, it is noticing the problem, leaving the edit, finding the file, running the command, and coming back.

Runner removes that loop. It is a panel that sits inside Premiere Pro, fetches the clip you asked for, converts anything Premiere cannot decode on the way in, and hands you an editable file you drag straight onto the timeline. The AV1 step still happens. You just never have to know about it.

Related: a 4K clip imported with no video track.