[Bob Spez]

I’ll try to add a jpg to my message. I graded the last frame of your video. It took about 3 minutes in Photoshop. The same effects can be applied to the whole video with Premiere Pro CS6 in about the same amount of time.

[Bob Spez]

What I see is soft focus and lack of contrast. Not talking about raw. I shoot in 1080P as well. If you think your camera is working differently then get some previous footage that you thought was good and compare some frames side by side on your monitor and analyze what is different. Is it the focus, the sunlight, etc.? Also look at the properties of the clips. Your baud rate at 67K is pretty high. Is you camera shooting at that baud. 32K should be plenty.

[Bob Spez]

Premiere Pro CS6 has some very good lighting effects you can add in post from spotlights to ambient lights to coloring the light. You can also change the focal length, turn a wide angle into a closeup, etc. Check out some youtube videos on lighting with Premiere Pro. You’ve got good equipment. I think you just need to learn some of the things you can do in post to totally change the look of the video out of the camera. You can’t improve the focus, but the color and lighting and focal length are all adjustable. Good luck.

[Bob Spez]

I set my colors to standard. I use Premiere Pro CS6 to grade. I don’t think it’s possible to get a professional looking video without doing some color grading. Check out youtube videos on color grading. Some people remove the color and contrast first, but I don’t. I’m just adding a bit of saturation and color correction and tweaking the highlights and shadows like I would a photo with Photoshop.

[Bob Spez]

Try setting all your camera settings to standard and do your processing in post. If you set your contrast low, that is what you got.

[Bob Spez]

Sounds like you need to manually focus to get a sharp focus. The depth of field can be controlled with the f-stop. Also, what iso were you shooting at? Higher or auto iso can produce a more washed out look than sticking to the low isos. Finally, shots need to be color graded to pop. If you look, you can see pretty heavy color grading on every TV show.
Another thought, is when on a tripod you should keep VR (vibration reduction) off. Another is try another lens to see if it makes a difference.

[Bob Spez]

I wonder what lens you used? Your overall focus is soft, and the women are more in focus than the man at the left. Are you using autofocus or manual?
Also you are shooting into the sun which gives the scene a hazy look to it. Maybe the lens needs to be closed a few stops to get a better overall focus and depth of field as well.

[Bob Spez]

Cheers Sam!

[Bob Spez]

Mr. Sam,
You are the only one on this or any other forum that had the answer to this question of insane CS6 export times which I have been researching and testing all day today.

Everyone else is ignoring the elephant in the room (for me it was 90 minutes to export a 1 minute 1080P 1920×1080 29fps video).

You my friend had the answer. I opened the export media window, checked the use same settings as sequence box, and then used the Queue option instead of the Export option to open the CS6 media encoder program. I used the upper left corner arrow to change format to h.264 .mp4 and selected 1080P 1920×1080 from the scroll down choices.

The 1 minute sequence was encoded in 18 minutes instead of 90!!!

The videos done in export and through media encoder look the same.
Heres the details:

1. Through Export.. 1920×1080,16095kbps, 29fps, 48kHz stereo-190 kbps.
2. Through queue to Media encoder…1920×1080,34178kbps, 48kHz stereo-190 kbps.

The media encoder mp4 file is twice the size of the export mp4 file due to double the bit rate, but that’s not a disadvantage, if anything it is an advantage.

Thanks a million. CS6 Premiere Pro is now encoding 5 times faster, and that is with a puny 1.4GHZ HP Slimline PC with a bottom of the line AMD E1-2500 CPU with built in Radeon Graphics GPU and 16 GB of RAM.

Mr. Sam you have made my day! Thanks!!!