4:2:2 sits between these, while the full vertical but half horizontal resolution for the color data, and is the default format for SDI connections. A 4:2:0 video file has basically half res color detail in both dimensions, while the 4:4:4 file has full-color data for every pixel. The human eye is more sensitive to brightness than chroma, so higher resolution images could be encoded more efficiently by focusing on the luminance values over the chroma data. 4:2:2 refers to the amount of color data in a file and used to be much more frequently discussed when the industry was making the jump from SD to HD.
Without hardware acceleration, these newer 4:2:2 HEVC files do not playback well at all on most systems. With the most recent release of version 22, Adobe added support for accelerated decode of 10 bit 4:2:2 HEVC files, specific to Intel Quick Sync, because neither NVidia nor AMD currently supports 4:2:2 acceleration in their GPUs. 10-bit color hardware acceleration with 4:2:2 System configuration Intel® Core™ i7–1165G7 Processor 16 GB RAM & Intel® Iris® Xe graphics. This is when I started using hardware acceleration for more than just testing purposes, and supported up to 8K on newer hardware, but it was still limited to 8bit color. This capability was much more applicable to high-end workstations, which don’t have Intel’s consumer Quick Sync feature, but of course, had a top-end discrete GPU. This supported hardware acceleration of H.264 and HEVC encoding with both NVidia and AMD graphics cards, regardless of your CPU.
Then in June of 2020, Adobe added GPU encoding acceleration to Premiere Pro 14.2. The next step was hardware-accelerated decoding of H.264 and HEVC, which made editing with those codecs much more doable on less powerful systems, especially when it came to scrubbing through footage, which is usually rough with long GOP formats.
The quality was also inferior to software encodes in the initial release, but that was fixed shortly thereafter. Adobe started with Intel’s Hardware based acceleration for H.264 and HEVC encoding in version 13, which was limited to 4k at 8-bit, on CPUs with Quick Sync video processing, which from my perspective, was laptop chips. Premiere Pro has had CUDA based GPU acceleration for over a decade, since CS5, but it was not utilizing NVidia’s accelerated encode and decode hardware until recently. The newest updates to Premiere Pro have greatly increased the number of hardware-accelerated options for HEVC workflows, greatly increasing performance with those types of files. And unlike with software encoders, there are a finite number of supported encoding options that can be accelerated, each of which has to be explicitly supported. But this hardware acceleration requires specific support within software applications to utilize them. There have been both CPUs and GPUs available for years that have dedicated hardware within them to accelerate HEVC encoding and decoding. The High Efficiency Video Codec (HEVC) or H.265 is a very processing-intensive codec for both encoding and decoding but leads to higher video quality at lower data rates. Hardware Accelerated HEVC in Premiere Pro Mike Mcarthy writes about the power of hardware-accelerated HEVC with premiere pro in his article, Hardware Accelerated HEVC in Premiere Pro, originally posted on Nov 30, 2021. Adobe’s leaders at Adobe MAX 2021 announced great new features for their video products.