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Sharing & Exporting: Overview

(applause) Okay. We've finished our show, we're ready to export our show. But in this we're gonna do a lot more than just exporting our final show, because there's a lot your will discover underneath the export dropdown menu. It's also considered sharing, so you might hear that. It's like exporting and sharing, some people use those terms interchangeably, in the video environment. And what we're gonna do is we're gonna look at a quick overview of some of the export options, some of the things and ways you can export. We're gonna look at exporting a single frame. We actually touched on that on an earlier lesson, but it's one of those valuable things, how you save a frame of video. A master copy. A master is just like sometimes you want to save and uncompressed version for your show for archival purposes versus a compressed one that you're gonna deliver to the web. It's kind of saying I'm saving the layered Photoshop file, because I may want to go back and make a change. But I'm also g...

onna save a flattened version that I can send to somebody, or maybe even a JPG on a flattened version. So this is what we're technically doing by exporting different versions of our finished program. Also you can export single sequences and create your own project. You can export clips. Maybe you wanted to make a modification to a clip or even change the codex of a clip. And we'll talk about that as we see it. And then we're gonna briefly step into an application called the Adobe Media Encoder. The Adobe Media Encoder is actually, the engine for that is what Premier uses when you export to do all the compression. It's also a self-contained program that you can use that you can do batch exporting and whatnot. As a matter of fact many of the Creative Cloud applications leverage the engine of the Media Encoder when you're exporting, whether After Effects uses the Adobe Media Encoder. Audition because it's audio can use it also. The Encoder does both video and sound and of course video and sound together. So the engine can be used by itself, but you can actually use this as a standalone application. For instance maybe you want to make multiple versions of your show, and you don't want to have to open up Premier, you just want to drop in that master file your created. Let's take a look at the program and some of this will become more apparent. So let's go ahead and we're gonna work with that program that we just worked with in the previous lesson, the art show. Again it's a very simple program, and what we're gonna focus on is exporting as opposed to editing. So where do we find our exports? Well if we go up under file, there's a dedicated section called export. And you see there's a large list of things that you can export. We're not gonna go through everything. A lot of them are very specific to say broadcast or unique environments. So mostly you're going to be exporting to media. Exporting to media is what you're going to do to create a copy of your show, whether it's giant master copy at 1920 by or maybe you're making a special web version for Facebook, or for Snapchat, you know 10 seconds, 15 seconds. These presets are in there. So export media, there is a default keyboard shortcut for that. Command M, control M. And that will allow you to quickly get to it. Again that's a keyboard shortcut I really don't remember, because I know where it is, and I can right click on something to do it. So that's one of the big ones. I do want to point a couple of the grayed out ones. We've talked about some of these. I'll zoom in a little bit, even though they're grayed out, so you can see it. What these are so you're just aware of them. Again you're probably not gonna use a lot of them. Batch list is basically an export list of the clips you used, you probably won't use that. Again a lot of these are for broadcast. Titles we did talk about when we looked at titling. So if you have a title that you have selected, you can export that as something that you can then save to a thumb drive, email somebody or even put on your Creative Cloud folder, so you can access it and import that into another show. Premier actually allows you to do closed captioning, where you can manually type things in. And with closed captioning, you can also either buy software, which is ridiculously expensive, or you can send out the audio to get a transcript that you can then import a special type of file. And so you'll be able to do the captioning, what not. Again, a powerful program that we're using. Everything from our photography sizzle reals all the way through broadcast television, which is required to have captioning, to theatrical films. All of it is embedded in here. Tape, I find that amusing. I don't think I've put anything out to tape in years. But there is probably some facilities that are archiving things to tape. You will always probably be putting it out to file. Maybe DVD, that's gonna be a question that people ask. If you need to make a DVD, which again, is now an obsolete technology. You would export it as a media file, and then you would create the DVD in a DVD authoring program. Adobe has a legacy one, but they've realized that people aren't doing it, so they're not even updating it. But there's a couple out there. DVD authoring is all you need to search on the web. Okay so really when you're getting down here, it's the media, you see this whole list. Audio. We'll look at Premiere Pro project file, and that's not highlighted because I don't have a sequence selected. So let's just go ahead, I just want you to be aware of that. It's interesting I said, "Well what about exporting a frame?" Let's get that out of the way. We've already looked at that not necessarily in super amount of detail, but if I needed to send a frame of video either to put as many a promotional thing on my website or I want to print it somewhere, I can go that from directly inside the interface, and I can print either what's inside the source window, and let me switch back to my editing view for this, for our export. So if I have something inside my source window, and we don't want it to be an audio clip, so let's go back here. I'll just match frame that, it'll be easier. We learned about match framing if you hit the F key. Being able to see this stuff is great. There we go. And let's reset this back to the default look. Okay. So if I want to say that or that, I can either go here and grab this little camera and click on it. Shift E is how I would export it. It creates a file that you can choose. But this is why I wanted to revisit this. We saw this earlier when we were actually working with speed changes, and you saw that you have a variety of formats. But what I didn't go into was what size is this image? Because we wanted it to be the perfect size for video, and it was, so there was no need to talk about it. When I export anything from Premiere, it will export that as the size of the image that you have. So if it's a piece of video that you recorded in 1920 by 280, it's gonna be a two megapixel image. If you need it larger, I would take it into Photoshop and scale it up. If you do it from your sequence, if it's 1920 by 1080, your sequence, it will be that. If you sequence is 720p, that image will be 720p. If you are using something say a 4K image and you bring it into the source monitor and export it, it'll be the size of the 4K image, which is almost 4000 by a little over 2100. So it's whatever it's original size is, if you haven't brought it into the sequence. So the left side. If you're grabbing that camera from the right side, it's gonna be whatever the size of the sequence is, and you can save it in whatever format. So it's just something you go, wait a second, I shot this big or my original JPEG was and I just did a screen grab. Why is it so small? It's because it's using that information. So it's important to understand that. It's also very useful because, you know, just a still image from video is fine. If you have a photograph, you want to go back to the photograph. If it's something where you've created a layer, now I have two clips on top of each other. And this would've been something I should've caught when I was doing my finishing, and I wanted to bring this up because I did miss it. It's like oh I put this cut away, but I see the seam behind it by accident. Okay so I need to scale these up. But if I built something that had some text on it or some sort of compositing. So let's say I did use this image and I'm gonna go ahead and squeeze it as a picture in picture, 'cause we want to see what's happening there. If I grab that freeze frame, it will be this entire image right here. So this is great if you're create like a title sequence, and you want to show somebody and example of what it's gonna look like with some stills, you can go ahead and export that with shift D or using the little camera button. Very useful, but remember, it's not really print quality, because it's only two megapixels. But it's great to send somebody if they wanna do approval, and if you need it bigger, take it into Photoshop, they have great upscaling tools. So that's exporting a picture. Now let's talk about, again, I used this expression already once. Where the rubber meets the road. What you really want to do which is exporting your show and how confusing that can be at first blush. So to export a sequence you have to have one of two things selected. You either have to have the sequence selected, or you have to be in the project file, and select the sequence icon there. Okay it has to know what you want to export. So if for reason that's grayed out, or you don't see the right thing, make sure you have the right thing selected. So we're gonna go ahead, we're gonna hit export media. And you're gonna get this dialog box. And let's just kind of explain this. Got a nice freeze frame there. And this as I said can be very very confusing at fist. So you open this up and you see export settings and you see all this confusing information. Is this a little confusing, scary? Yeah, okay it is, it is scary. It's scary for me and I've seen it a lot. The reason it's scary is because there is so many options and so many things it can do, they gave you these options, that you can be overwhelmed by choices. The nice thing is that there's a lot of great presets that you don't have to think about all these numbers. When we first started going to digital video and people were putting things on the web, and you saw you could download stuff from iTunes and whatnot, people had entire jobs, and there still are people out there, they were compressionists, and this art form, this voodoo art form of how I can take something that's huge and make it digestible that I can download, and you know there's a real science to this. And the average person would like send it out, or you would go with these presets. Now we can do pretty much most of what we need to on our own, but the whole point is you wanna put out your program and sometimes as I said archival, you want to keep it completely uncompressed. You want to keep it like a TIF file, the equivalent, or a TNG file. But that could be in the tens of gigabytes. Some of these files I've had have been 60, 70, 80 gigabytes, even larger, depending on the length of the show. That's something that I can keep on a drive, but it's not anything I'm gonna send anybody. I'm not even gonna Dropbox that likely to anybody. So I want to make it smaller. So let's take a look at some of these settings and how they will affect you. Sometimes you just want to click on match sequence settings. And by the way it generally tries to remember the last set of settings that you use. So if you're continually using stuff it will do that. And so this will try to match everything to whatever your sequence presets are, okay? And it's just trying to make a clone. But if you want to change any of that, you can go down and you have a lot of control. I'm gonna uncheck it, and what you would first choose is the format. 'Cause once you change the format, you'll then have other options below that you can adjust. So here you're making kind of a decision about, okay what's my need, and what do I want to do with it? And even this list is overwhelming. But the nice thing is is that for the most part, you may use only two, maybe three of these choices to start with. It is very likely that you'll probably use H.264. That's pretty much the defacto standard at this point in time for the web. So anything you've downloaded from iTunes, or from YouTube, the stuff that's playing on YouTube. On Facebook, whether you're downloading it or playing it. It's usually compressed with this codec, we've talked about codec briefly called H.264. And what this is it's really smart math to throw away the information that you don't need to make the file smaller, okay? And they're getting better and better with the codec. Some of these are older codecs, some are broadcast codecs. So H.264 is gonna be your defacto probably output. H.265 is a new standard that is starting to be, it's just smarter, smaller and sharper. But not everything can play it back. So that's why I'd go back here, and for specific things, if you're putting out to Blue-ray, you're making a Blue-ray DVD, learn about that when you need it. H.264 is one flavor you're probably gonna choose. The other one that some people choose is QuickTime. Because we all are aware of QuickTime, and I had mentioned this earlier, but it merits repeating, because this is all very confusing. When you hear about compression, there are a couple parts to it. There's codec, which is the math to compress it. That's things like H.264, MPEG. The algorithm, it's a big word for basically what we're gonna through away and what we're gonna keep. Okay? That's the codec. And then there's something called wrappers, which is what you put this compressed stuff in. And you'll see things such as QuickTime is a wrapper. If you see M4V or MP4, that's a wrapper. It's basically what's the container that this file is in. Some containers have very specific rules for what's inside, some can hold almost anything, okay? Generally the presets are fine, they'll figure it out, you don't have to worry about that. But that's just a little thing so you can get your head wrapped around it. You know Windows used to have one, and they discontinued it, and I already forgot what it's called. Whatever there. But you know .MOV would be an example of a container, okay? So this is the codec, once you pick the codec, then you'll have some choices in the next section. So we're gonna look at two of these now. We're gonna look at H.264, we'll also look at QuickTime. And then as soon as I do H.264, there's some defaults here I can do, and I usually, if I want a nice high quality yet compressed version, I would use match the source, which is basically keep everything the same size, same frame rate and everything. But compress it to H.264 and keep it at a high bitrate. We had a question I think, I was talking about bitrate and bandwidth. So when you're streaming something off the web, whether it's Netflix or something off of YouTube, you know depending on how fast your internet connection is, how sharp it's going to be. Whether it's going to buffer and whether it's going to be pixelated or not. Those are all things that we've all experienced from the viewers point of view. So a high bitrate is it's trying to send more information down the pipe. It's a bigger file and it may be more challenging to say view that on an iPhone on cellular than it is to view on your high speed internet at home, okay? It's gonna create a larger file too, so if you're looking to send it to somebody, what it's saying is, I'm going to cap out, and this is going to be jargon for some of you, at 12 megabits per second, okay? So if you don't have that fast of a connection, there could be a problem. And you may go to medium and say, I'm gonna cap out at six megabits per second. So it's a smaller file, less demanding, but it's not gonna be as sharp. So those are some things, and you might, when you're putting out your show, export it both ways and see if you can see a difference. Depending on the complexity of your show, you may not need it. And something to keep in mind is, it's really hard to compress complex imagery and lots of motion. So if I'm just standing here, you can compress me to a smaller file. I fell like this is Willy Wonka right now. You can compress me to a smaller file. If I'm waving my hands like normally I do when I teach, there's a lot of action that it has to compress, it won't get to be a small of a file, and if you try to make it a small file by forcing it, my arms may get all, you know, artifact-y and break up as I wave them. So these are some of kind of an overview of the challenges you have when deciding compression. These are the two that I jump to the most, the defaults. They're easy, they work great. If you go down the list, you will see way too many variations of like, oh the Kindle, the Fire, the Android phone. 1080, 12, you know. Guess what? A lot of these are the exact same configurations, but they put them all in because some people are very literal and they go, I need to send one out that my friend can watch on their Nook, okay? And you can pick it. And this may end up being exactly the same one as the Android one, but that way they don't have to go and try to figure it out. So don't be overwhelmed. Most of the time you're going to use the first two. I mean I have a TiVo, I love my TiVo, I'm never compressing anything to put on the TiVo, but it's there. But they try, and they update this with each version. If something's getting more popular, you know, the Vimeo stuff, and they can tweak it. So if you know you're going to Vimeo, make a Vimeo version. It follows the specs so when you upload it. So these are very accessible, but don't worry about these ones that you don't understand. Why do I have to know them all, okay? That's basically the rule of thumb. If I switch to QuickTime, just to show you as an example, and sometimes I master to QuickTime, that's a different wrapper. I don't have as many options. But I can go ahead and I can say, oh yeah, I need a QuickTime because it's going to open up on my Mac or something. And you can go ahead and you can say, oh yeah, put it in a, see it says rewrap? QuickTime is the container. And so I say, ah, rewrap, good. It's giving me a lovely error, won't let me do a rewrap. So I can go ahead and I can do custom ones. We'll leave it at DV for now, 'cause that's gonna change. So you can go through and make all of these modifications to your video settings. And I just want to clarify what some of them are, if you need to make a change. So I went up here and I said I'm going QuickTime, and I'm picking just one of these defaults that it will let me pick. I want to pick something generic. I'm gonna go ahead with, we'll go with DV Widescreen. 'Cause that's not the right one, but I want to teach you. So I can look down here and that says, oh look, that's 720 by 480. My original is 1920 by 1080. I know I don't want this. But I can go down and I can customize all of this again. Again it gets a little bit mentally confusing at first, but I can then pick what codec. And if you're familiar with Apple, they have their own codecs for very high quality stuff, one is called ProRes, and it's a very uncompressed formula or algorithm. And I can go ahead and check that, and this would be something I might do for mastering. So as soon as I make that change, I can start making some other changes. My preset was 720, well I don't want 720, I want 1920. So I change that, as soon as I change that, because there's this little lock here, it switches to 1920 by 1280. And I don't have to sit there and change everything, but I'm gonna go down here and you know, there's lots of things you can make, it's progressive. The point I want to make here is once you make these changes if you know you're gonna do this a lot, and probably you would make these changes if somebody came to you and said, "I have these specific settings "I need for my video that you're giving me." That will rarely happen from the average person. That will happen from a web designer, that may happen from a broadcast facility. If you're giving it to somebody to watch or putting it up on the web, I can almost guarantee you, you will use the H.264 dropdown and pick from there, and you will probably use master high bitrate or something very specific if you know you're going to YouTube or Vimeo or whatnot. But I just wanted you to be aware of this stuff, hopefully not to confuse you too much. But you have all of this control here that we're not gonna dig deep into, because you can spend two days on learning compression. So I'm gonna switch this back to what you're probably gonna use, which is H.264, high bitrate. You can still modify things, okay? If I wanted to I could go ahead and say, I want to make it smaller. I probably would've picked a preset, but if you uncheck this as match source, you can then make a modification to that. It'll be grayed out until you uncheck it. But unless you know what you're doing, don't play with it. 'Cause you can break it. There's that bitrate setting by the way, the 10 to 12 for high. And then if I switched it to the medium, you'll see that number of 10 to 12 change. So let's go back up here. Oh I know what I'm not seeing it, because I zoomed in. If I go here to medium bitrate, scroll down. Video settings, you can see that that bitrate has dropped from 10 and 12 to 3 and 6. That's a pretty big jump. So that's maybe something like, oh, three and six is too low, but 10 and 12-- The reason why there are two numbers, one's an average and one is like, I am not going to exceed that higher number, okay? I've delivered things for Vimeo and they've said, oh you can push it to 20, because we'll recompress it for the slower machines after that. Yes, there was a question? I noticed there are a number of YouTube options on the presets. Should we do 264 or go to one of those if that's what our goal is, to put it on YouTube? Well 264 will reveal all the YouTube ones. And I thank you for asking that, because I want to make sure that it's clear, and I don't think that I was. This is really where you're going to go to 264, and then once you're in there, then you see all of these options and you can pick it, and that's where you see all of your YouTube options. Generally what I would do is I would take the highest size and send that to YouTube, and they will create the smaller versions on their server automatically. If your original sequence is not 4K, don't send them a 4K file, okay? So you don't want to use it to up-res, but you don't have to create a 480, a 720, and a 1080. You send them the highest quality, they create all the version. And Vimeo is the same way, as well as Facebook and whatnot. So yes I showed you the other stuff but I'll tell you, for everybody watching, for you in the room, you will probably choose H.264, you will probably choose these two, because they will still be accepted by these services, so maybe you're gonna want to upload it to Vimeo and to YouTube and to something else. So as long as you give them the highest quality, which this is pretty good, they will down convert it to what's appropriate for their service. And if you go to any of these services, they'll actually have a page of what are the specifications, the maximum specifications for what we'll accept. And they may go, you know, we'll do high bitrate, and you know the default here is 10 and 12, but they may go ahead and say, you know something, we can take a maximum bitrate of 20, okay? And you may go ahead and change that to 20, and can even do another 20. And you'll get a much bigger file, it'll be slower to upload. But when they recompress it it's gonna look better, okay? And those are changing all the time. In other words they're getting-- They're allowing larger files and greater bandwidth that you're using files because they can then convert them. So I made it actually sound a lot more complex than it should have been, but I know people will see all these choices and go, well what do I do with them? The reality is, until you get knowledgeable, there's no need to touch them, it's beautiful he way it is. Yes? Can we tell which containers support the transparency for the alpha channel? Yes. So what containers support transparency? Let's say I built a graphic that I want transparency. The highly-compressed ones do not. So as a general rule, H.264 does not. Usually I would put it inside of a QuickTime codec. So I would go to QuickTime, let me zoom in on that so we can see it. So that's the wrapper, and then picking the codec is the tricky thing. So the codec I would actually use would be an animation codec, or ProRes four by four, which isn't here at this point. I would have to build that, okay? And you only have to build it once. So I could go QuickTime and I would go something close, it doesn't matter, I'd go CineForm. And now I would go down here and I would chose the right codec. 'Cause I need to get there. Animation will hold it and ProRes four by four or four four four will hold it. What this stands for, you'll see these numbers, again, you really don't need to know a lot behind it. This is basically how it samples the luminance value and the color values, okay? And this is regular television. Four four four means you're doing a lot of sampling, and the last four is the transparency information or that alpha channel. So both of these do, there are some other variations. Those tend to be the most popular ones for an alpha channel. The four Apple ProRes is smaller than animation. Animation is beautifully clean, but it's very large. But that's 'cause you're maintaining something being very crisp. So let's jump back here, go into H.264, pick up where we're going. So I commented that you could change the bitrate. If you go ahead and you change that bitrate, I'm gonna just slide this up to 20. As soon as I change anything here, make that 18, you will notice at the top of my screen that my settings have now switched to custom. You've modified it. And the nice thing about that being custom is I can then go ahead and I can save that as a preset. And when I save that as a preset, it is not available in my dropdown window. So if I save this under H.264, I'll find it under H.264. If I make the animation one or the ProRes one, I do it under QuickTime, I'd have to find it there. You can also export these and email them to somebody or put them on a drive that you can then import presets, okay? And that's really kind of nice. But yes, and the beautiful thing is, if you make, and I generally do make a couple customs for some specific clients or just I like them that way. Like I put out a ProRes or both a ProRes and an animation QuickTime version, 'cause I use it a lot. I can just get to it really quickly. So that's worth doing.