Exporting from Premiere Pro

Adobe Premiere CS5

Anyone who has used any version of Adobe Premiere Pro will be at home with Adobe Premiere Pro CS5.5.  As Adobe have changed the versions that have kept all the basics and 99% of the keyboard shortcuts the same, they have just added extra features.

Premiere Pro has a huge feature list and many links to other Adobe programs such as Encore and After Effects.

The main features are: 

ADOBE MEDIA ENCODER

Adobe Media Encoder changes

With CS4 Adobe moved the Media Encoder - the part of the program which takes your timeline and changes it to something else - out of Premeire into a stand-alone program.  This means you do not just send Premiere timelines to it, but can throw in any files you want to remake or After Effects compositions. 

With CS5 Media Encoder is 64 bit - so will use multiple processors and more memory better, which means it is faster.  It also work better in the background on the current range of multi-core processor computers -i.e. it will run at the same time as Premiere Pro, meaning you can encode one timeline while working on another.

 There are some other small yet useful changes:

New "match source settings options

Two options that appear on some of the encoders - match sequence settings and options to base certain settings on the source settings.  Both will customising your encoding settings just a little bit easier.

Either queue items or instant export

With CS4 you would choose to send a timeline to Media Encoder, press a button and Media Encoder would load the item, then start encoding.  This is still available and great if you want to encode several items ins a queue or encode things in the background while you carry on working in Premiere Pro.  However, if you are just after a quick export it also adds to the number of clicks and time you have to wait to export some video.  With CS5 you can "export" or "queue" as item. "Queue" will add it to Media Encoder, "export" will make the file there and then.

With CS5.5 you can also simply drag lots of sequences from Adobe Premiere directly to the Media Encoder. You can also create "watch folders" - specify a folder for AME to watch and then any files dropped into that folder will be automatically encoded into the format you specify.

Encoding in Media Encoder

With Encore you can layout the disc and click build and it will convert all your footage into the right format for you disc (DVD, Blu-ray orFlash) in the process or making the disc.  There was an option in CS4 to "transcode now", which basically meant it started doing the encoding while you were laying out the menus.   This "Encode now" process has now been taken over by the Adobe Media Encoder, so it can harness AME's 64 bit power. 

Matrox now support encoding in Adobe Encore as well as Adobe Premiere using their MAX boards.  These have special chips to encode video into h264 in realtime (as opposed to 3-4 hours for 1 hour footage).   You have to set the bit rate etc yourself if using the MAX Encoding, where as letting Encore decide the settings is easier, but it will save a lot of time!

Better support for Photoshop video files - you can now load video clips made with Photoshop into Premiere without having to render them first.

Better project manager - now you can trim offline clips and also choose to trim individual timelines, rather than the whole project.

Less audio conforming and peking - now you can choose to save conform and pek files with the media so move the files from one machine to another and it does not remake them.

Encore

The biggest advance has to be the dynamic link with Premiere as outlined above. These two programs really now belong together.

Other changes include:

Better flash export options - now we can make out Encore tutorial in Flash at decent quality. Encore supports various different sizes up to 720P HD footage saved in a new H264 Flash format. Our Encore DVD has been produced so far as just a video DVD version, but a better higher quality one is being produced with Encore Cs4 right now!

Subtitles on Blu-ray discs - a feature missing from CS3.

Blu-ray pop up menus - these are the new type of menus that you can get with Blu-ray discs that appear over your video while playing. Nothing else at this price supports Blu-ray pop up menus. With Encore you can only do one layer of menu but that is enough to manage a decent bit of navigation.

Dual Layer Blu-ray writing - Encore now does dual layer as well as single layer Blu-ray discs.

Small usability improvements - the flow chart can be zoomed and you can change the size of the icons.  A lot of work has been done to improve the way Encore deals with pre-made MPEG files.