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Sharing & Exporting: Size And Quality

Couple of other choices that you can make if you need to. So some of these settings are available in H.264. Some would not be available in QuickTime because they're not relevant. So I just wanna point out this thing called VBR, and 1 Pass, and CBR. This is something you may see, and I just wanna kinda, just open your eyes to stuff and jargon you may hear. CBR stands for constant bit rate. Okay, we're talking bit rate which is how much data is being pushed down the pipe. It uses up a lot of space even if it doesn't need it. So if I'm compressing an image, and there's no movement, it's gonna use the same amount of space as if there's a lot of movement. And your goal is to get smaller files. So what they came up with is this variable bit rate which basically says... Look at the image and if you need a lot, use a larger bit rate. But if the image becomes more stationary, maybe you're holding on a still image for five seconds, I can drop my bit rate, which makes it a smaller file, and then ...

I increase the bit rate when I see movement and a lot of action. So it makes a much smaller file and allows you to make a sharper file. And so you'll often see 1 Pass and 2 Pass. What that simply means is that VBR 1 Pass means as it's compressing on the fly, it's making the decision of how small or how large, or how big that bit rate is gonna be. 2 Pass looks at the file completely, it does a full analyzing of your video before it starts compressing, and with that knowledge, when it goes back to compress it, it can even make a smarter decision. So you tend to, with 2 Pass, it's gonna be twice as long to output, but you will probably end up with a smaller and sharper file. I like to do 2 Pass VBR. It's taking a little bit longer for the export, but I've worked a long time on editing this show, I want it to look good, and that's why I do that, that's why I do 2 Pass VBR. So I would make that change even to the default of that high bit rate, and I'm gonna go ahead and say this is a custom now. Mkay, that's some of the things that I like to do. It's really one of the big changes that I make. We really haven't talked about VR video. This is a, I know the question came up. So this is them breaking into it, they've actually worked very hard with a lot of the VR companies. There's quite a nice relationship between Adobe and a lot of the VR companies. So the integration's really nice. It is only gonna get better because this is really, this is exploding. That's the next big wave, I think, of what's happening in the market is the VR stuff. So that is in the software, we, of course, at this level, won't go into that. But that's your video, the audio again, is going back to the default, that's all fine. I do wanna point out there's a couple of other settings that you may have questions about, and I just wanna do some clarification there. So video and audio, that's great. Leave everything as it is. There is a tab called effects, and the nice thing about this tab called effects, is that it allows you to modify your program on output without having to worry about modifying the original file that's in your sequence. Which sometimes is, but most of the case, is not necessary. I usually do it in the show. The things that you may apply might be a stylistic look. There's these looks that come with it that can give it a specific vibe or feel, and you can build one. Some people would do that. Again, if I'm gonna put a look on a show, I'm probably gonna do an adjustment layer, like we learned in color correction and put the look there. I don't wanna necessarily put it on output. But it's available. Things that can be beneficial are things such as an image overlay. Mkay, so let's say you wanna put a watermark on your video, or you wanna put some sort of a... A lower third or above that says this is yours, you can do this upon export instead of having to do it in the program. Cause maybe you wanna do different custom ones for different clients, or when it hits the websites, you know, oh yeah, this was from so and so. Maybe you wanna watermark each client's cause they're reviewing the Oscar nominees. So you can do that and then once you have it chosen, you can actually look at where you're gonna position it and scale it, and you would see that in this little box right here. In fact, let me make this full screen. Just so that we don't get confused by what's behind it. So that's one of the things that you can modify. And there, you would actually have to look at an image file. If it has transparency, there you go, PNG files, Photoshop files, TIFF files. If you just wanna write something, mkay? You can go ahead, you can do name overlays, input information, and that name overlay can be several things by default. For instance, maybe you just wanna do, what was the name of the clip on track one? And this is really useful if I have a bunch of video clips, I throw them all in a timeline, I now can export them with a watermark, so if I give this to somebody, they can say, oh yeah, this is the clip number, this is the clip name that I'm working with, okay? You can also do this with a time code overlay. So, depending on the camera that records it, I could put the numerical number that is associated with that video clip. And by numerical number, the counter number, okay? So a lot of cameras don't record something called time code, but it may record time of day. You may have it set up to record time of day, or you may just have it, every clip starts at zero, and it still is a good reference if you have both that and the name of the clip, they can say, oh yeah, at 22 seconds in on this named clip, I need this shot, or it's a good reference for you of what you've used. So these are things and again, try them, see what they do, play with it on one clip, two clips, and you can easily position this stuff. You can control the opacity so that it's very subtle, versus blocking the whole thing, or maybe you want it to block the whole thing so nobody uses that rough cut, thinking it's the final cut. You give it to the client, they're like, oh yeah, that's fine, and then two months later, they go, oh yeah, why wasn't that fixed? It's like, that was the rough cut I gave you. So that's all useful stuff and you can kinda figure that out by just playing with it. You can also have it try to do some equalization with the audio, fixing stuff. I always like fixing this stuff in post. Sometimes, and one of the things that you can do, in addition to throwing things onto a timeline, you can select a bunch of clips from your project file that you haven't done anything with, and re-export them as individual clips. Because maybe you wanna put a watermark on them, and work with those, or maybe the client needs all the camera rolls to make a decision, you can then put this information on your raw files, or a copy of the raw files. Especially if you're shooting something very uncompressed, and you wanna give the client something small that you have to be able to upload. So you can export the whole show, you can export clips, this is all very useful. This is a really cool feature that... Has come in handy, let me see if I can find it, I saw that for a second. These are all audio. Time turner is something really cool. Let's say you cut something and this is 35 seconds long and I have to deliver something that's 30 seconds, this is pushing it, it's at 10%. I can actually change and say, you know something? Speed everything up on the export and make my final export 30 seconds. And it's going to slow it down by 10, speed it up, I guess. And so, I do need to get to the 30 seconds and oh my goodness, they're just gonna let me push that far. So you can actually change the duration and it will speed it up or slow it down. This is more like, you have a commercial that's 32 seconds, you need it to be 29. Or you have some audio files that you don't wanna take into Audition. Just some things you can play with, the fact that you have this power is really nice. It will try to estimate what your final file size is. It's a best guess because until it actually does that 1 Pass of analysis, it's a guess. Most of these, I would not mess with. Sometimes, I'll do what's called a pre-render if I have something very complex, some animation, I will just export that one section and I'll say, oh, bring it back into the project, so now I can place it in my timeline. So maybe I have something really complex and it's like, oh you know something? I wanna export this out so I don't have to keep rendering it over and over again. Or it's really complex and I'm stuttering the playback. I can export it and the nice feature is if I say, import back into project. It will then actually put a copy of that into my bin that I can now work with, instead of me having to go out and find it and re-import it. Some basic stuff. When you're ready to export, there's another thing that we talked about, and that was when you slow things down, the way it interprets the slowdown, it could double frames, it could dissolve between frames, or you could do optical flow. If you're doing a lot of speed changes, you may wanna switch to frame blending. It will increase the amount of time it takes to export, but anything you've slowed down will look better. If you haven't slowed anything down, there's no reason to change this. If you slow down a lot of stuff, yes. You should also, as I said, when we talked about speed changes, if, when you set it to frame blending and it doesn't look appreciably better, then don't worry about it. Don't make it do more work than necessary unless you're really patient and you have a really fast machine. Optical flow, go to Kauai for a week and come back, and hopefully the power didn't get lost. So that's one of the big things. I did see a question come up and I'll answer that. I'm a little bit confused about the relationship between the codecs and the wrappers, because they're all listed in the same dropdown and so I'm assuming that if you pick a wrapper, it always has the same codec that goes inside that wrapper, right? But I assume that a codec can be inside different kinds of wrappers. I don't know if that's true or not, and if so-- Well, the most true thing is that I confused you. Okay. Which is my bad. You will pick the wrapper first, okay? Or the flavor, let's go with that. And then some wrappers can have only one codec, so the first thing I do is I go up here. This is the format, is really in general, think of that as kind of the wrapper. Sometimes the format and the contents are the same. So this is the first thing. As soon as I select this, this changes. Everything inside that second dropdown, is related to what's in the first dropdown. So, I zoomed in a little, a little too much. So if I switch over to, just say, I want to just put out an audio file, that changes. So this is the case where an audio, I only have one choice. But with some of the video formats, and some of these are broadcast formats, when I selected, say, MPEG2, there are still choices but not as many. So this is the first thing you're gonna change. And then based upon this selection, this dropdown choices, some are repeated in different wrappers, some are not. You, for the most part, everybody will probably be using H.264, and unless you have a specific requirement of like an alpha channel or transparency channel. But do take note that I can export still images. I can export just audio. I can export, what's called, an image sequence which is all my video, basically, as separate pictures cause that may be something that needs to be taken into like an AfterEffects file or any kind of animation program. You had a follow-up one for clarification? What I thought I heard was that H.264 is a codec and that QuickTime is a wrapper, and that's where my confusion comes in. It seems like you have codecs and wrappers all in the same list. Well, yes. You know something? You're absolutely right. That it is confusing. And H.264 actually is a codec, but it is such a popular codec that it is actually best to use it as a format. If you notice, this doesn't really say wrapper, if you look here, it says format. It's a good way of, let's say, simplifying it and simplifying how complex I'm trying to make it. So you're picking this codec and when you do H.264, it's gonna create one of those probably dot, I apologize if I get this wrong. I think it's M4V, there's also MP4, one of them has digital rights management associated with it. So that's gonna be that little thing that's after it. So definitely, this is a codec that you can put inside, say, QuickTime. But... When you switch here, it automatically, and I think this might clarify it a little bit, I hope. I'm gonna switch to H.264, and when I look down here at the output, it should tell me that it's gonna make it into an MP4 file. Okay, that is a universal H.264 file. I could go and say, you know what? I'm gonna make QuickTime. And you'll notice that it should say now a .MOV file. But I could go down and underneath my preferences say, you know what? I want the codec to be H.264. So it's using the same math as a H.264 file, but it still is in a QuickTime wrapper so it's a .MOV. If you download movies off the web, you'll notice that a lot of times they have different suffixes. Some are .MOvs, some are .MP4s. The computer usually is smart enough to play them all. And there are some codecs that play really well, are that play on Macs that don't play on your Windows machine. And occasionally, vice versa. So for instance, QuickTime is not native to a Windows machine. But I bet most people have played QuickTime movies on their Windows machine. And that's because one of, probably three things, have happened. A, they've downloaded iTunes, which automatically downloads the QuickTime codec to let you play it, or they've downloaded another third-party application. What's really cool about Premiere is when you install Premiere, they've licensed those codecs from Apple and so you can play a QuickTime pro-res movie inside of Premiere, like normal. But you can't export it. And you might not be able to play it at the Finder level, if you open up, you know, Windows goes through the web browser. Internet Explorer? Explorer, they use Explorer to search your machine. There was my brain frying at the end of the hour. And you can't play it in the Finder, but then if you go ahead and you put it in Premiere, it plays. As a matter of fact, there'll be other formats, sometimes, that are unique to a camera, that Adobe has licensed the codec from the company. So once you drag it in, you can see it, or you look at it in the media browser, and that's why you can play it. Like some of the MXF's, you'll see .MXF, but you can't play it if you look at it just in Explorer, or even on a Mac sometimes in the Finder. So that's where it gets really, kind of like, confusing for our heads. But I think it was a great question because I did explain earlier that you're talking wrappers and codecs. But if you notice here, they actually call it a format and it's an attempt to simplify it that people wanna put out H. and they don't really care about the wrapper. Because usually when you upload it or give it to somebody, it'll play and those default MOVs usually play on your Windows machine, they always will play on a Mac. And if I switch this back to an H.264 flavor, this becomes .MP which is a universal. And as I switch to different codecs and different things, that'll change. Now if I did an audio file, it's gonna be a WAV file, mkay? So it, and that's where looking at this helps. But I think what I did is I over-explained it and I apologize to you guys. But again it goes back to, I wanted to give you a little more knowledge, not necessarily to confuse you, but because you'll raise like, why didn't he talk about all these other things and I'm really confused and should we just ignore them? And the truth is, I think we've learned that, for the most part, other than changing bit rate, you should ignore them. There's a couple more things I do wanna touch on. So, once I've made all these decisions and changed everything. I'm ready to do two things, I'm ready to export it. And so people would say, okay, queue or export? This is not what you wanna do next because you will get bitten by a little thing that I'm gonna slide over here, which is... Zoom out a little bit. Oh! Because I'm exporting out an audio file. Let's change that back to H. and I'll even just for the joy of things go ahead to matching bit rate. So this is what's going to catch you sometimes. The default, until you change it, is sequence in to out, mkay? And what happens is you're exporting, you go, wow, this is going so fast, I have my whole show and it's only taking like 12 seconds, I love my machine! And then you play it back and you discover it's the last edit you made because you have that in and out point marked on your timeline. This is great if you want to export just a chunk of your show to show somebody. What you generally want is you wanna make sure that you have entire sequence checked. And then you put out your whole show and discover that it does take a little bit longer than 12 seconds. You can trim. So if I want, I can actually grab these little blue bars, it's kind of like my in and out points, and now I will just export that range, mkay? So... That's just a gotcha. Always make sure that it's entire sequence. It will remember it the next time. But the first time you export, it defaults to in and out. And then when you're ready to export, you have two choices. Well, three if you want to cancel. But, after all that hard work, who would want to cancel? If you click on export, it's going to lock you out of Premiere so you can't continue to edit. It's gonna take all of its processing power and focus it on compressing and exporting that video. It goes immediately to export, mkay? So that's like a one off, and usually, it's what I do cause I finish the show, I just wanna put it out. If I want to keep working or if I want to export multiple sequences as I'm working, I can hit queue. And what it will literally do, it will put it into a queue and open up Adobe Media Encoder. And now I can have it export in the background while I continue to work, maybe, on another part of the show. Okay, so, this is, see? It usually launches Media Encoder, yes? So behind, it's launched Adobe Media Encoder, this is opening up in the background. And I can keep editing or I can go ahead and grab another shot, or maybe I wanna export another flavor of it. Okay, I'm exporting out the H.264 for Vimeo, I wanna also export out a master. Or maybe I just wanna export out the audio because I need to do a podcast with it. So queue allows you to queue these up and then you would switch over to Media Encoder, it's launching in the background, probably if I move this, you'll see the window of it launching. There it is, it's fully launched. And it should populate in just a moment. If I didn't play with it too much, but it should populate it there and then you would just simply execute at that point. See, it populated it there. So that's all the settings. If I needed to change the settings, this is just Media Encoder by itself, I could go ahead and duplicate this. And when I've done everything, export. We're gonna just barely touch on Media Encoder, again, you could spend a day on compression, I'm always spending more time than I hoped to. But this is where you can start building, an easier place to build those custom presets, such as the animation and the QuickTime, because you have all the controls here. And when you save them here, they're accessible in anything that uses Media Encoder, such as Premiere, such as AfterEffects, such as Audition. But this is kind of your batch exporter and just some of the things that you can do is you can create, what are called, watch folders with Media Encoder. So, you have a folder in your computer and whatever video you drop in, it will see that new video is there, it pulls it regularly, and it just compresses it and does whatever rules you told it in that watch folder. You may create a watch folder that says everything I throw in, give it a window burn of the time code and the name, and make it really small, and then send it to my Dropbox. Okay? So it automates that function. Very powerful program. Again, you could easily spend an entire eight hour class doing that. Just wanted you to be aware of how that works. So let's jump back into Premiere. We're not gonna execute that. Gonna go ahead and quit out. So I can select a sequence there, if I wanted to, I go into my bins. I can select a bunch of clips. You can see when I right-click on it, I can say, export media, K? I have a lot of those same controls so I can export elements. See, I can queue that into my QuickTime, they're multiple ones, right? So I'm gonna be queuing that up, the single one you're doing. I'ma hit cancel. Some other things that I showed, I'm gonna select this sequence and hopefully this setting should be available under export. So I wanted, I had this sequence. I built one sequence and maybe I did multiple versions of this show. I'm gonna go ahead and find this, I need to find this inside my project file. So I can right-click on the name and I can say, reveal the sequence in my project. There it is, the art edit. I can right-click, I can export it there as a show. But also, if I have it selected here, and I go up to file, export. There we go. Selection as a Premiere Pro project. So what's interesting and we're gonna talk about this more when we talk about media management, but you'll find this under export, is if I've done a lot of different shows, maybe, or maybe I've cut a 30 second version and I wanna just have that as a self-contained project with all the media, that I wanna hand off to somebody or archive because maybe everything else was just junk I was playing with, I can have it create a brand new project with just what I did inside of that sequence. So that I can have a much smaller version to archive. We'll look at that in a little more detail when we look at media management and archiving, but. It's actually found under the export settings. So with that said... We're pretty much wrapped up with much of the exporting, or sharing options. Hope I didn't blow up your heads too much. It is, potentially, very confusing. I wanna give you the takeaway. You're simply gonna select your sequence, either in the sequence, or select it from the bin. You're going to probably right-click and say, export media. You'll get this crazy dialogue box. You will most likely choose H.264, unless you have prebuilt it for that outfit channel, which definitely some of you will be using, You will then probably use high bit rate and maybe even notch it up a little bit, and you're gonna say go. You're gonna say export and you're gonna get yourself a cup of coffee. You may also switch from 1 Pass to 2 Pass VBR, that's my suggestion. 2 Pass VBR... It's not the default but I like it. If you're allowed to send higher bandwidth, if you find your files are too big, that's when you start playing with the sliders or picking other sizes or versions, and then export. So everything else, is just bonus confusion material.