Adobe Premiere Pro 1.5 encoding (export) problems.

November 12, 2006 9:55 AM

Adobe Premiere Pro 1.5 encoding (export) problems. Hopefully someone can help me out!

I am having an issue with my Adobe Premiere Pro 1.5. Recently, I worked on 30 minute video for a local band and whenever I tried to export, I get some type of an error. For example, I have tried to do Export To DVD option, but it only burns half way and then it says stops with 'Unknown Error'

The other options I have to burn with come via the Adobe MPEG Encoder which has mpeg1, mpeg-vcd, mpeg2, quicktime and windows media. No matter which option I choose, the rendering time is extremely slow (up to an hour of rendering for a 30 minute file) and when I actually exported it as mpeg1, it came out very very tiny (in resolution) and the actual video was much darker than the original one I have within the timeline.

I have tried to work it out for the past 9 hours, I am completely baffled.

Does anyone have any tips/suggestions to what I should do? Is there a way to encode this 30 minute file that will not be huge in size and actually export the file correctly and not small and darkened?

Thank very much in advance!

posted by cheero to Computers & Internet (4 answers total)

FWIW, I've never had luck with the Export to DVD function. I'm using 2.0, however.

For a DVD, you'll want to to MPEG2. In fact, 2.0 has an option to render as MPEG2DVD.

Rendering will take a long time. I wouldn't expect anything different.

Is there a way to encode this 30 minute file that will not be huge in size and actually export the file correctly and not small and darkened?

Generally, no. The better the quality, the larger the file size.

Use the media encoder, set the format to mpeg2 or mpeg2-dvd, whichever is an option. For the preset, you'll want to select either NTSC or PAL depending on where you live, and then the quality selection. Like I said, the higher the quality, the higher the file size. As you adjust the settings, you'll notice towards the bottom of the screen an "Estimated file size" in k/s. For a 30 minute movie, you'll want to multiply that number by 900 for a rough estimate of the final file size. The output resolution should be 720x480

Hope this helps.
posted by nitsuj at 10:50 AM on November 12, 2006

I too, get very little joy rendering my band's vids to DVD via Premiere.

Workaround: Make Premiere export the file to an uncompressed AVI (keeping the original quality, you might lose due to any codec's compression), then convert the HUGE uncompressed file to MPEG2, MP4, or whatever with a (free) tool like SUPER or VLC. My favorite program for these kinds of chores is VirtualDub, because it's easy to tweak the brightness, contrast and such. And it works when Premiere crashes.

As for the big file size and long rendering times, you pretty much got what you got.

My blog tries to address these kinds of issues in a bit more detail.
posted by derekb at 12:12 PM on November 12, 2006

Yeah, I agree with derekb, best bet is to export as AVI (I find DV AVI is generally the shortest rendering time compared to uncompressed) and use third party software to MPEG it. I've used TMPGenc in the past which works quite neatly!

I shall be checking out these other ones though!
posted by TwoWordReview at 2:24 PM on November 12, 2006

This has worked famously well for me: Use the Premiere Pro plugin for the DebugMode FrameServer to serve frames to either VirtualDubMod or TMPGEnc.. It saves me the trouble of going to an uncompressed AVI. (Premiere Pro renders slow no matter what you do, it seems like.) I believe SUPER (a frontend for mencoder and ffmpeg among others, which are included in the install package) will encode from DMFS but I haven't tried. Good luck!
posted by ostranenie at 7:47 PM on November 12, 2006