Help with premiere pro project settings

[Vince Becquiot]

Where are you posting the videos? AVIs / WMV won’t play back on Macs, and not everyone on the PC side has Quicktime, which leaves you with Flash/H.264.

But that needs to be embedded somehow. If you are going to YouTube, H.264 is also a good choice.

As far as settings go, start with 512×288 square pixels at 900 Kb/s (for Flash flv), or 512×288 square pixels H.264 at 3Mb/s for YouTube.

You would also have to crop 8 pixels left and right in the export panel to lose the black bars.

Vince Becquiot

Kaptis Studios
San Francisco – Bay Area

[Don Chard]

Thanks Vince

I guess the real issue I’m having is that my sequence is 720 x 480 ( 0.9 ) and all my assets are ( 1.0 )

Everytime I’ve exported something, only a couple times have I gotten a nice workable video, but the Camtasia video is always blurry and not clear.

I will be hosting the video on my server, and I would like to export either an .avi or .mov file, so that I can import back into Camtasia to create the flash file for the web.

Thanks for the input, I’ve tried MANY export settings, and I can’t get anything to work

[Malcolm Neakl]

great quality for me is JPEG 2000 and Animation, but size wise, dont bother. H264 and MPEG4 are good compressors, the best of all pro has to offer if youre uploading to youtube, or flash but I’m not an expert with flash settings.

You should find a way to interpret your assets to be the same size and aspect ratio before exporting.
otherwise it will be good for one set, but display others all weird.

Remember your project settings are only for editing and what you see in pro. They don’t effect the original files, or the quality of your exported files. Only your export settings do.
I made that mistake. Editing in AVI animation, or uncompressed. Took a year to render.

in my exp. all the AVI compressors are half as good as thier Quicktime counterparts.
To test this, go to new item, bring up colour bars. make it ten seconds, and half way through make it rotate 360o. that will give you a good view of how each compressor handles colour and pixels.

sto pro veritate

[Don Chard]

” You should find a way to interpret your assets to be the same size and aspect ratio before exporting.
otherwise it will be good for one set, but display others all weird. ”

Do you mean within the timeline?

Does the fact that my sequence settings are 720 x 480 ( .919 ) and all my assets are ( 1.0 ) affect the output?

I believe this is where I’ve gone wrong.

I’ve tried creating a new sequence at 800 x 600 ( 1.0 ) and copying and pasting my timeline items to get a fresh start, and when it gets rendered it gets cropped and stretched all weird.

I’m really running out of ideas as to what to do, and I need to get this video done yesterday. 🙁

[Malcolm Neakl]

changing the settings of your sequence will only alter the way pro lets you see the project. This is for editing purposes. It doesnt effect the files you use or export. So if you have photo that is 1024×576 and your time line/project settings are for 800×600, it doesnt alter the photo, it just means the view window wont show the sides, and you’ll see black bars at the top. but, if you export it as 1024×576, it will be just like your photo. not like you see it in premier pro.
you can see in your project window that one piece of footage is 1024×576 1.422par and 720 x 480 .919 par. so no matter how much in the timeline project it looks right, until you make the original file the same PAR as the other files, the exported videos aspect ratio will adversely effect one or the other respectively.

right click one piece of footage in your project window and interpret the footage to a PAR of the others then just resize it to make it look normal.

remember project settings is just for the premiere pro sequence viewer. Interpreting your footage in the project assets window will equalise everything.

sto pro veritate

[Malcolm Neakl]

in regards to editing in a 1.0 PAR? lol, this is a pain. because the DV1 NTSC (pal for me), uses a really fast codec. Which is why its in there. What you’ll have to do to make the viewer see what you actually have is get the project settings to 1.0 PAR. you cant do that with the dv ntsc. so on a new project, choose custom settings. general> editing mode – video for windows (or mac alternative if youre on mac)
That all of a sudden allows you full control of the project PAR and frame size.
so 1.0
and whatever window size you like.
you can go to town coz it wont effect your quality, only the quality of how you see it in the editing suite.
so the lower the better. As I recall the Codecs are all slow as hell thats
Video Rendering>File format then compressor. I cant remember which ones are fastest. But speed is the key not quality, since as I said, its just for while you edit. Just while you can interpret all the footage to 1.0 PAR in the project assets window when you import all your work to this new project and then resize them so they dont look squashed after you have harmonised the PAR.

Im no expert, but ive had similar issues, and hopefully this is enough know how to help.

remember, even if your project settings are using a black and white only codec (cinepak radius codec black and white setting) and all your footage is looking black and white, thats only the viewer, your project will export in colour regardless as per your export settings.

sto pro veritate

[Don Chard]

Thanks for the feedback, at least it gives me hope that it’s not the sequence settings that are the problem.

The video fits perfectly into Premiere’s preview monitor, it’s only when exporting that it comes out all blurry.

I think I understand what you’re saying now….

Because my video is 800 x 600 and my images are 697 x 511, they are conflicting with each other and therefore not exporting properly.

So I guess, what I need to do is capture a new set of images at 800 x 600?

And then just replace 697 x 511 images with 800 x 600 images, right?

I just don’t want to do the whole sequence over again, but I could easily replace the images, and add the transition effects right away, without having to mess with the audio.

Here are my images & video settings

Sequence: 720 x 480 ( .9 )

Type: JPEG
File Size: 87 KB
Image Size: 697 x 511
Pixel Depth: 32
Pixel Aspect Ratio: 1.0

Type: QuickTime Movie
File Size: 24.4 MB
Image Size: 800 x 600
Pixel Depth: 24
Frame Rate: 30.00
Source Audio Format: 44100 Hz – 16 bit – Mono
Project Audio Format: 44100 Hz – 32 bit floating point – Mono
Total Duration: 00;04;53;05
Average Data Rate: 85 KB / second
Pixel Aspect Ratio: 1.0

QuickTime Details:
Movie contains 1 video track(s), 1 audio track(s) and 0 timecode track(s).

Video:
There are 8796 frames with a duration of 1/30th.

Video track 1:
Duration is 0;04;53;14
Average frame rate is 30.00 fps

Video track 1 contains 1 type(s) of video data:

Video data block #1:
Frame Size = 800 x 600
Compressor = H.264
Quality = High (4.00)
Temporal = High (4.00)

Audio:
Audio track 1 contains 1 type(s) of audio data:

Audio data block #1:
Format = 16 bit – Mono
Rate = 44100.0000 Hz
Compressor = MPEG-4 Audio

[Don Chard]

So basically, what I’m going to do is re-create all images at an 800 x 600 resolution, and then replace them right into my timeline.

Therefore, the images and video will be the EXACT SAME dimensions, so hopefully now I will get the desired output needed. 🙂

I’m already testing a resized image now, with the video to see how it turns out.

Will keep you posted, thanks for the feedback!

[Malcolm Neakl]

Since both your assets have the same pixel aspect ratio basically your video should look normal since your export settings are exactly the same as your video. Your pictures should be non pixelated, and just have black edges due to them not filling out the space correctly. try viewing the video on quicktime player.
Since I just tried a similar conundrum as your project and windows media player would not show the visuals, but quicktime played it as I expected.

if it is your original video asset footage that is the problem, perhaps you have funny video data. Like my XL2, which records with 960 pixels, squeezes that image signal to 720 pixels, then to view it correctly you have to make the width 1024! at 1.0 PAR, despite it being recognised as 1.422 PAR original asset footage.

with my xl2, if i export at the pixel aspect ratio of my original dv tape signal (1.422), which is the standard thing to do, I get a squashed image.

ive yet to learn why Canon gave it 960×576 instead of 1024×576.

sto pro veritate

[Don Chard]

Thanks for the info.

I kept digging around last night, and finally ran into this info:

https://forums.adobe.com/message/2063028

In a separate article it also suggested that I needed to upgrade to Premiere Pro 4.1 since it had an improved rendering engine.

So, that’s why no matter what export settings I attempted, the camtasia footage never exported correctly, and was always blurry and unclear.

Now to try the advice given in the article above. 🙂

Thanks very much for the clarifications, and information given here, it is much appreciated!