Exporting Your Video from Adobe PremiereEssentially 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 - 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 Export Timeline ->Movie then choose 'Settings'. General: Filetype - Microsoft AVI (unless you are doing a DV export or similar) Range - Work Area Select Export Video but not Export Audio as we will do that later. Also, deselect 'open when finished' as I've found that can crash Premiere sometimes :) 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 hardare 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. If you are going to be using any virtualdub or TMPG filters then you should choose RGB. You should also use RGB mode if you are going to do any after effects etc. As for virtualdub filters you shouldn't need to use them as AVIsynth has YUV filters for just about anything vdub does (except one good temporal cleaner :). So if you want to have better compression and then use avisynth for your filtering, then use the YUV mode - if you want to play it safe and not convert the colourspace yet, use the RGB mode. When you have selected the HuffYUV codec choose 'Configure' For YUV compression, in the RGB compression method pulldown menu choose 'Convert to YUY2'... For RGB compression choose 'Predict Gradient (best)'. If you do have RGB compression enabled in huffYUV then make sure you select "Always Recompress" in the Premiere export settings. 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. 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. Frame Size - this should be EXACTLY the same as your source
(e.g. 720 x 480) Keyframe and Rendering: Optimise Stills 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:
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. 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. Even so, it's not an ideal way of doing things.
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 Timeline -> Audio and click 'settings' General Settings: File Type - Windows Waveform Range - Work Area (keep it the same as your video export. If you have exported in sections then you should export the whole work area so that the audio starts at the beginning of the first video section and ends at the end of the last video section) Embedding Options - None Audio Settings: Rate - 44Khz (or whatever your source audio was) I don't use logarithmic fades but note well that whatever you chose for your project should be chosen here in the export settings otherwise fades will sound different, just like if you choose different video options the video will look different. OK out of there and save that .wav somewhere safe ready for compression later.
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