Burbin, thanks for re-rendering the file to mov. That plays a lot nicer with Premiere and After Effects for me. I’ll take down my band-aid ffmpeg encode, because I agree it’s not the best method. Anyone who uses the new clip should be aware that it has an alpha channel, so make sure there’s nothing on tracks below it as there’s holes where Burbin turned the lights out!

I don’t see any generational loss from 21C Peasant’s file to yours, but the shot looks noisy (to me) and I think it’s because of being scaled up. It probably would be a good idea to do a pass of de-grain, re-grain, to help the shots match.

To get in the nitty gritty weeds with JakeRyan17, he’s correct. I would add that Prores is still technically a lossy codec, so any conversion could have some minor generational loss. The best reason to convert to prores though is because it’s all I-frames, massively reducing the CPU load necessary to run it. Some H264s files can be slow to work with, stutter a lot on playback or while seeking (clicking around the file). This can really slow down editing and in some cases even crash Adobe. Prores is silky smooth.