H.264 from Premiere... totally confused.

PrimeMover · Post by **PrimeMover** » Wed May 09, 2007 7:03 pm

Alright, I come here as a TV producer, and know next to nothing about compressing video for web use. I created my AMV in Final Cut at home, and then exported it to Premiere Pro at work in order to do a little bit of final touch ups in After Effects. I've got a perfect DVD copy. I've read But going online here and trying to learn how to make an h.264 compressed video... it's like I'm trying to read Greek, and I'll admit it, I'm totally lost.

I downloaded AVISynth and MeGUI, attempting to follow what I could of the tutorials up on this site.

So I'll ask this simply. Currently I have an NTSC, interlaced 720x480 DV-AVI exported file from Premiere. From that I made a 640x480, progressive, uncompressed-AVI. Which one should I use, what software am I going to need to use to encode it with, and what do I need to do to make it work? As I've said, the tutorials are getting me nowhere. Should I just send it back to my Mac and compress it with QT-Pro or Handbreak?

Damn Premiere for having such an unbelievably lousy encoder... I can't even make a decent MOV file for the FCP users in my market, it's just emberrassing!

Minion · Post by **Minion** » Wed May 09, 2007 7:41 pm

this is my method. (for PC). you'll need to have avisynth installed for my version.

export it as AVI with either lagarith, or huffyuv codec.
make a notepad file reading with:

avisource("filename.avi")
converttoyv12()

make sure it's in the same directory as the AVI.

save it with the .avs extension
load it into zarxgui
encode
profit!

i don't think megui will take .avs, so you should be able to just load the AVI directly into it.
having never used megui though, i cannot confirm this. also, you'll want your footage progressive since this isn't going on a TV

Willen · Post by **Willen** » Thu May 10, 2007 6:22 am

Compressing to H.264 using Zarx264gui guide.

AMVapp version 3.0 beta is available here. It contains Zarx264gui and x264, among other programs and utilities.

PrimeMover · Post by **PrimeMover** » Thu May 10, 2007 2:50 pm

Alright, I tried the Zarx264GUI, and got a file, but it stutters and finally crashes on every computer I've tried it on (including a few dual-processor workstations), using iTunes or QuickTime Pro. The filesize looks about right (61MB for a 6:41min AMV), and it does play a little bit, and I can skim through it. It just seems like it's taxing the processor(s) more than I would expect. I've done a lot of mp4 encoding on my old powerbook, and created files that played without problem, so I don't know what's going on here. I'm currently trying a run with megui.

Should I upload it and see if anyone has any ideas of why it's stuttery/crashing?

Zero1 · Post by **Zero1** » Thu May 10, 2007 4:16 pm

iTunes/Quicktime have only partial H.264 support, so this is possibly the reason it is not working right. Try to play the file in VLC, or on some other player if you can get to a Windows PC with the correct codecs installed.

I just wish there was some way of contacting Apple and telling them to get their act together.

Zero1 · Post by **Zero1** » Thu May 10, 2007 4:17 pm

Also yes, and upload would be great.

Minion · Post by **Minion** » Fri May 11, 2007 9:16 am

from what i've been told, the mac version of h.264 is some watered down version. including the decoder.
(can anyone verify?)

VLC player should play it smoothly on both mac and pc