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Exporting in MPEG2 or other format
Hello everyone,
I am new to these forums and it’s fair to say I’m new to video editing as well. Before posting this I’ve tried to search for the answer to my question but couldn’t find the specifics unfortunately.
Here is the issue. I’ve recently captured footage from a Canon HV20, using MiniDV tapes, with Adobe Premiere Pro. The format coming out of these tapes is 1440×1080 with a pixel aspect ratio of 1.333.
The captured footage has been stored in the computer as files of about 1 hour (the usual storage capacity for tapes), but I would like to cut these up into clips of several seconds to organize my work.
I have tried to find out which settings to use, and figured exporting as ‘match sequence settings’ would be the best way to retain the original quality. However, as Premiere has many formats to choose from I started to have second thoughts. In response I tried exporting as MPEG2 which seemed to give similar outputs. However, there are several parameters which can be changed, of which the bitrate (target) seemed important. The higher this target bitrate is, the larger the output file becomes. When comparing the results, the difference seems neglectible, other than the size and the average data rate.
My question therefore is simple. If I want to keep the quality of the original captured footage (from the tapes), what format should I use to export? Is ‘match sequence settings’ the best (the sequence in this case is HDV 1080i25 (50i) resulting in a framesize of 1440×1080 (1.333)? Or should I change to a different format such as MPEG2 and change some of the settings myself?
Any answers are greatly appreciated. I’d rather make a few mistakes in the beginning than realize something went wrong after cutting up hours and hours of footage.
Thanks in advance,
Stef -
4 Replies
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Hi Stef,
First we need to determine your goals. Do you wish to “save” portions of the captured clip as individual clips (exports) so that you can then delete the original capture file? If you are NOT deleting the original clip, then you do not need to create new clips – every time you do this, you are losing quality, and as you have found, which codec do you use?
Within Premiere, you can create “subclips”, which look like new clips from the original, but are simply defined by a pointer that references the original material. No need to create entirely new clips again.
If there are only certain parts of the HDV tape you wish to use, then I might suggest you only capture those parts. Use Log and Capture to mark, then capture, the individual scenes (clips) you want.
I don’t know which codec to recommend for the exports you want to do – you are really looking for an “intermediate codec” – I think most of the codecs available in Adobe Media Encoder are really meant for final delivery and not editing purposes. When you choose the “Match Sequence” option, all that really does is try to match the frame size, frame rate and other aspects of original video, while using the chosen codec, it does NOT export to the same codec as the source footage (HDV is Long-GOP MPEG-2 at 25Mbps, with very specific settings).
I’ve always had Matrox hardware in my edit systems, so I’ve been able to just export to the Matrox MPEG-2 I-Frame codec when I wish to create a new clip for archiving or other purposes, so again I don’t know what specifically to recommend that would have good quality and reasonable file size for re-editing in your case.
Jeff Pulera
Safe Harbor Computers -
Hello Jeff,
Thanks for your reply! This certainly clears up some mysteries for me, although it’s hard to grasp everything you say because I’m new to all of it. To be complete, I use the CS5 version of Premiere.
To start off, the main purpose for cutting up the hour long original clips is that I hope to create a ‘database’. Right now the footage consists of approximately 65 clips of about one hour. Eventually I hope to organize this into themes, such as traffic, people, nature, beaches, markets, etc. For this purpose I rather have single clips outside of Premiere than clips inside that are tagged to the originals. This would enable me to rapidly find the appropriate clips for new projects. What do you think about this?
To what codec I use, and I hope I’ve grasped this properly, the extension on the original is .mpeg , when I create new clips matching the sequence they are also .mpeg , but for instance exporting as MPEG2 they appear as .mpg. Perhaps you mean something different though, so excuse me if I’m mixing up some terms. The ‘match sequence settings’ have the set format of ‘MPEG preview’.
I’m unsure whether I should proceed this way. It’s a lot of work to cut up the clips but that’s something worth investing time in. That is, at least, if it provides me with an organized set of clips at the end, in the best quality/size ratio.
Any more info or thoughts are much appreciated, thanks for now though.
Stef
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Hi Stef,
I understand what you wish to do, and my recommendation would be to re-capture the HDV footage from the camera via 1394, but this time enable the “Scene Detect” button in the CS5 Capture window.
This will recognize breaks in the tape recording, and will save each scene as an individual, sequentially-numbered clip. Now you have what you want, and can then rename each clip something appropriate, and put the clips in different folders, etc. to organize and archive. Best of all, you have the original quality of each! Just about anything you would export to would result in a much larger file, so you also have economy of file size using original .mpeg captures.
While HDV video is an MPEG-2 format, there are many different “flavors” of MPEG-2. You can’t directly export to the HDV codec, and by going to something else, you are recompressing the footage (quality loss).
Hope this workflow suits your needs
Jeff Pulera
Safe Harbor Computers -
Hi Jeff,
Thanks again for your very helpful answer! The scene detect button is indeed amazing and it cuts up the tape automatically.
What I will do is follow your suggestion, and capture from the original tape again, this time creating single clips directly.
The only ‘issue’ that I am still debating is how to smoothen the initial rough shots. Because of the camera handling it often happens that the beginning and/or end of the clip show some movement which will have to be cut off in a later stage.
When exporting these original clips I’d want to aim for the best quality of course, and that if I understand correctly is MPEG2. The more specified settings I still have to figure out but this is a huge step in the right direction.
Thanks again!
Stef
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