PP to Media Encoder best practices

[Chris Knight]

Although I’ve never experienced wait times on that scale, I’ve found it’s quicker to open the sequence, and export it to the media encoder using FILE->EXPORT (hit queue, instead of export in the encoder settings). Compared to opening a sequence from within Media Encoder (without Premiere open), it’s much quicker.

However, once the sequence is in Encoder, I’ve never had delays. How much RAM do you have, and what’s you CPU?

[Dave Fleming]

I’m running a Dell T3500 with a Xeon 3.47GHz CPU and 12gb of RAM.

I tried what you suggested and it did speed things up. But, now I’ve got another problem. My sequence is SD NTSC Widescreen. I chose “match sequence settings” to keep things at their highest quality, and it created an AVI file. The problem is that the resulting movie is .91 aspect (not widescreen) even though everywhere I look in Media Encoder it says it will be 1.21. Any suggestions?

[Chris Knight]

What format are you trying to export? Your first post mentiones FLV and MPEG, and now you’re exporting a DVI-AVI. Let me know what you’re trying to accomplish, and I’ll walk you through the steps.

[Dave Fleming]

Thanks–that would be helpful! I’ve spent the last few hours plugging in format after format, preset after preset, only to get the same results.

Here’s what I need to do: I have a 720×486 widescreen sequence. I used a sequence preset from my Matrox MXO2 LE box. Everything in the sequence is 1.21 PAR. I need to get it to a Harris encoder so the files can be encoded for air. The Harris will transcode almost anything you feed it, so it doesn’t really matter what I output: MPEG, AVI, QT…as long as it’s NTSC SD full resolution 1.21 PAR.

So, to my eye, I was getting the best results when I chose “match sequence settings,” which greyed most other parameters out. And indeed, if the output would match sequence settings, I’d be golden. But, the AVI that spits out is .91 PAR (4×3). I have no idea why.

[Chris Knight]

Export the movie, so it brings up the export settings. Uncheck the Match Sequence Settings box. For the format, pick anything you want. Let’s go with Microsoft AVI. Under Preset, choose NTSC DV Widescreen. Make sure Export Video and Export Audio are checked (they should be), and you’re done.

If you want a slightly higher-quality format, go with h.264, and choose NTSC DV Widescreen High Quality for the preset. This will take longer to render, if you don’t have Mercury Engine utilizing the GPU in your system, so try both and see which one produces better results.

FYI, most of the format selections have a DV NTSC Widescreen preset.

[Dave Fleming]

Sorry man, you’re missing it. I’ve been trying yours and many other formats/presets all day. Every setting I can browse through says that the sequence will be rendered at DV Widescreen. Trust me, I’ve got that selected every way from Tuesday. But, my resulting movie, no matter whether it’s QT, AVI or MPEG (all selecting DV Widescreen) is always .91 PAR–i.e. NOT DV Widescreen.

[Eric Sanders]

Hi Dave,

Could you post a screenshot of the AME encoder dialog and the sequence settings values you are using? That might help us see what’s going wrong.

Thanks,
-EricS

[Dave Fleming]

Sure…I’ll post a few. First, the AVI attempt…

Now, a QT approach…

Here’s a screenshot when I attempt to “queue” instead of “export.”

And finally, the image is always seem to end up with…incorrect pixel aspect ratio!

And remember, I’m showing you two examples. I’ve tried literally dozens of variations. all with the same result. I’m to the point where I’m wondering if this isn’t somehow tied up with my Matrox sequence preset…?

[Chris Knight]

I’d say this is definitely a source file/sequence issue.

[Dave Fleming]

I just wanted to add a final post to this thread. I began working with Matrox support in Montreal and they discovered that there was indeed a bug in the export to Media Encoder that would cause any Matrox sequence that happened to be 16:9 SD to be rendered 4:3. They are working on it. Thanks for your help, as always. For now, I’m just working in a DV NTSC Widescreen preset and bypassing Matrox altogether.

Dave