Exporting your video from Premiere Pro

Essentially this part is very very easy, but there are some things here that people make mistakes on so it's worth going through what you need to do.

Firstly, your export settings should be identical to your project settings in every way but the codec. This means that in order to get the same looking amv out of your project that you saw in the preview window then you need to keep all the settings exactly the same. The only exception to this rule, as I have said is the codec.

Secondly, in this guide we are going to export the audio separately as well as included in the avi file - this will give us easy access to the audio stream later on.

Also, this guide is geared towards compression with software codecs - if you are using the features of a hardware video editing card (such as a DV card) then you should consult the manual for that card. Of course, it should be equally possible to still use these settings but you will lose any realtime rendering benefits (and archiving benefits with DV).

Ready? OK, go to File -> Export ->Movie

You will then see a dialogue box that looks something like this (with maybe less German):

Choose an appropriate folder and name for your file. Once you have done that, click 'Settings...':

General Settings:

File Type - Microsoft AVI (unless you are doing a DV export or similar)

Range - Entire Sequence, In to Out and Work Area Bar should all be pretty self explanatory if you've made an amv with this program. Choose whichever one will export your entire video.

Select Export Video and Export Audio - you don't actually need the audio but there's no harm in including it as well.

Embedding Options - none

Video Settings:

Compressor - This is the important part. There are only 2 things you could ever want to choose here - HuffYUV (included in the AMVapp) or Uncompressed RGB (unless you are using the native options of a hardware card). Occasionally I get errors with my HuffYUV files which result in what I call 'dirty frames'. This could be just my system but whenever this happens I resort to using uncompressed RGB. It's big as hell but it works.

HuffYUV actually has 2 modes of compression - YUV and RGB. You should always export RGB from Premiere as it is the native editing colourspace of the program - this ensures that everything will look as it is supposed to.

To make sure that HuffYUV compresses the footage in RGB mode, and to set up other options, choose 'Configure' next to the compressor.

In RGB compression method you should always have Predict Gradient (best) selected. This will make sure that when Premiere sends the codec RGB footage that it is compressed as RGB and not as YUY2.

The other options in the Huffyuv settings are not actually important when exporting from Premiere. Enable RGBA compression is useful if you have used Alpha Channels but this is mostly a feature you would need more for Adobe After Effects. Enabling this option in Premiere would just give you needlessly bigger files.

Once these options are all selected, click OK to return to the Video comression settings menu.

Color Depth - "Millions of colours" means RGB24, "Millions of Colors+" means RGB32. You will only need RGB24 unless you want to retain the alpha channels (if you don't know what they are, then you don't need them).

Frame Size -  this should be identical to your source footage and hence to your project settings.

Frame Rate - again this should be identical to your project settings.

Pixel Aspect Ratio - You will always want to set this to Square Pixels to be sure of your output.

Recompress - If you do have RGB compression enabled in huffYUV then make sure you select this and choose "Always" (not Maintain Data Rate like the picture says). If you don't do this then Premiere can sometimes do a direct stream copy on clips and pre-rendered scenes and this could be in a different colourspace when using Huffyuv (as it has two modes). If this happens you will end having parts of your amv that are a screen of rainbows as the codec is only decoding either RGB or YUY2 not changing between them. Hence, you should always recompress to be certain it's compressing correctly.

Keyframe and Rendering:

Fields - this, again should be EXACTLY the same as your source which you should have worked out when you started the project. Progressive (non-interlaced) footage should be set to "No Fields (Progressive Scan)" and interlaced source should have the same field order as your source footage. This is a very important setting.

Optimise Stills - I don't really like this option. In theory it's supposed to be quicker but I've found that it can just mess up your encode sometimes :)

Keyframe Options - You will not need these as with HuffYUV every frame is a keyframe.

Audio:

Compressor - Uncompressed

Sample Rate - This is probably going to be 44100 Hz as that is the sample rate of CDs. If you used DVD audio as a source you may have to set this to 48000 Hz. Check your source before setting this option as conversion is not a good idea.

Sample type - 16bit

Channels - Stereo

Interleave - 1 Frame

Exporting the video file

OK, you should now be good to export, click 'ok' and choose your file name. Be warned, these files are big. If you are using Windows 2000 or XP make sure that you export to a hard drive that uses the NTFS file system otherwise long amvs might exceed the 2 gig file limit on old FAT32 drives. If you are running windows 98 then you are going to be limited to 2 gig - if you can't export the whole movie for this reason then you will have to select a frame range and export it in two or more sections. You can join these later in AVIsynth as follows:

AVIsource("C:/part1.avi") + AVIsource("C:/part2.avi") + AVIsource("C:/part3.avi")

If you still have problems with exporting like this, then you may want to download and install the Premiere Frameserver from www.videotools.net - however, I do not recommend using this for multiple encodes (including 2 pass encodes) as it is a very slow way of doing things. You'd be better off with a master rendered file to work from so if you use a frameserver, serve it straight into virtualdubmod and make a HuffYUV file as your master.The only time I'd honestly advocate using this method is if you have a FAT32 HD or HuffYUV is producing 'dirty frames' as using the frameserver and creating the HuffYUV file in Virtualdub can help with this. This compression method seems to avoid the 'dirty frames' issue and you can also use Virtualdub's segmented avi writing options to help with the 2 gig issue too.

Common Video Export Problems:

Cannot write to disk (disk full?) - this is usually a disk full error (you should clean out some more space for your file) but can also hapen if you are trying to overwrite a read-only file or to a read-only drive. This may also happen if you are trying to write a large huffyuv file to a Fat32 drive as it can only store 2gig files. If this happens you will need to export your video in sections.

Avisynth Access Violation - This is usually caused by a memory problem. The script has tried to do something but does not have enough memory - this is often because there are multiple avs scripts being used in the project and all of them want a piece of ram. To fix this you need to adjust the SetMemoryMax option using the Premiere AVS Gui. The default is 64 which should be ok but if you are getting problems and have lots of scripts, try reducing this number to have the memory shared more equally. If you have problems and you have very few scripts try increasing this value. This error can also happen if your script is in some way faulty. Check your scripts in virtualdubmod.

Exporting the Audio

When the video section has exported correctly (this could take hours if you are editing from dvd footage, be patient) go to Export -> Audio and click 'settings'

We are going to export a wav version of the audio as well. This will help us in processing this in other programs.

General Settings:

File Type - Windows Waveform

Range - Same as before.

Embedding Options - None

Audio Settings:

Compressor - Uncompressed

Rate - This is probably going to be 44100 Hz as that is the sample rate of CDs. If you used DVD audio as a source you may have to set this to 48000 Hz. Check your source before setting this option as conversion is not a good idea.

Format - 16bit stereo

Interleave - 1 Frame

Enhanced Rate Conversion - Best (but shouldnt be necessary as we arent converting the sample rate)

AbsoluteDestiny - May 2004