Exporting .flvs from Premiere Pro 2.0

[Mike Velte]

First off, stick with the VP6 codec. Give us your recipe;
1. What resolution?
2. What video bitrate?
3. What Font?
4. What size font?
Is there motion to your text?

[Athanie]

My recipe:

1. What resolution?
I’ve tried a bunch of them, 640 x 480 px is the largest I’ve tried. Text was still not great.
2. What video bitrate?
Audio bitrate is 128 kbps. For video, max data rate is 700 kbps.
3. What Font?
I used Tahoma in flash.
4. What size font? 15
5. Is there motion to your text?
there is some animations, but not for the text.

I realized that I could export from Premiere Pro a large Mpeg 2 file, which I can put into the Flash 8 Video Encoder (this is a separate program from Flash) and convert to an .flv. The result is much cleaner than trying the above recipe (exporting an .flv from premiere pro) However it’s an extra step and kinda a pain. I’m still not %100 happy with the clarity of the video, please suggest things if you have a better idea or technique.

Thanks a bunch

[Aanarav Sareen]

[Athanie] “How to I make it look crisp and clean? Does anybody have any tricks?”

Make sure that you are using large font sizes and large/round font types. Do not use fonts that are too “thin”.

Aanarav Sareen
premiere@asvideoproductions.com
https://www.asvideoproductions.com/techtalk

[Troy Murison]

Is your project a field-based format project (ie: NTSC)? If so, any animation you’ve done is rendered with fields. When you are encoding, are you deinterlacing? Most encoding programs’ deinterlacing features are really bad at deinterlacing (including AME) and result in just throwing away half the resolution. That works fine for small frame sized encodes but for 640×480 you’ll actually get a worse result than what you’d think, but of course you can’t leave the interlacing in there either. And with the text size you mentioned plus the fact you’re animating these rasterized stills that contain that text (is that right?), I’m not surprised at your description of what you’re seeing.

So, first make sure you’re working in frame-based project. And then I seem to remember PPro rendered fields anyway (at least in 30p) when doing transitions. I can’t remember what it did with transformations and I don’t have PPro in front of me to check, but I do remember this being a issue for me in the past. I also don’t remember if I’m thinking of 1.5 or 2.0. (sorry). My workaround was to use AE for animation and render w/o fields. Or if you have to, deinterlace outside of the encoding program with some other software or plug-in that is purpose made for that before encoding. You might want to do the scaling outside of the encoding software as well- it’s surprising how bad some of the pre-processing functions of those programs are!

Also, I’m not surprised your result was better in Flash Encoder. If you want the best quality, use the process that works the best for you even if it costs more time, or live with the inferior quality.

-Troy Murison
Seattle, WA

[Athanie]

The animations were not rendered with fields, I’ve been using Flash to create the animations from scratch, and am exporting (from flash) .png sequences, and unchecking the box that says “interlaced.” The project is rasterized when I export the .png sequences (I WISH Premiere was vector-based, wouldn’t that be a sight?)

I also wish that I used adobe after effects instead, it’s a real fun program (I used to do animations using AE rather than Flash) however using Flash eliminates a lot of extra steps since I’d have to create the graphics in photoshop, illustrator, etc. It’s too late to do the whole thing over in after effects.

I’m finally pleased with how the final .flv files have turned out. It’s a pain to export them twice rather than once (once from Premiere to quicktime, and then from quicktime through the encoder to .flv), but it’s worth the quality.

[Athanie]

Why yes, it is a double-post. : ) The more responses, the better, right?