Export without re-encoding?

G

gadg17

New member
Hi

Can I ask a noob question here? (Noob to Premiere and HD, at least.).

I have just installed Premiere Pro CS3 on a new home PC - am used to Avid Xpress at work. At home I'm shooting AVC/H.264 in 720p at 29fps and can import the footage into Premiere in a matter of seconds. I would like to export the edited product in the same resoution/format as the source, for streaming from the PC. But exporting using Adobe Media Encoder takes forever.

Is that to be expected? Should I be going via AME at all? And if so what settings should I be using? (I have tried H.264 720p and changed the frame rate to 29.97. Quality is OK; just the encoding time that's a surprise.) Do the project settings come into it?

Except obviously where there are effects, I had expected it not to need to re-render the footage for a "same as source" export - but I could be completely wrong there.

Any guidance on settings/workflow appreciated. The PC is a quad core 8300 running Win7 64bit with 6gb RAM and 1gb GT220 graphics card.

Thanks
David
 
That's normal. PP doesn't smart render h.264 without 3rd party plugins; it re-encodes everything. Only some formats allow passthrough in PP natively, like DV-AVI
 
Never render "in the same resolution and format" as the source unless you're sure it's what you want for a delivery medium. Generally when people do this they're trying to retain quality for additional post processing, and they're losing quality every time they do this.
 
@PDR - Understood, thanks. I tried the trial of Mainconcept MPEG Pro HD4 last night but it too needed to re-encode everything. File handling seemed a little smoother, though.

@Huy Vu - Any other output format you'd suggest to maintain the original image quality? I don't have Blu-ray - maybe one day - but I can stream most HD files from my editing PC to the main TV via a Realtek HD Media Player. My thought was to do that for home viewing and upload to the web for other family members to see.

Thanks again
David
 
gadg17 said:
@Huy Vu - Any other output format you'd suggest to maintain the original image quality? I don't have Blu-ray - maybe one day - but I can stream most HD files from my editing PC to the main TV via a Realtek HD Media Player. My thought was to do that for home viewing and upload to the web for other family members to see.
Click to expand...

Encoding falls into two categories: either you're taking the footage through a lot of post production steps (editing, VFX, color grading etc.) and you want to maintain as much information as you can through several generations, or you're rendering out a final output for distribution and viewing. For the former really the only way to go is uncompressed or through a semi-lossless intermediate codec, but the resulting filesize is huge and usually not suitable for viewing. For the latter, something like h.264 is great, but you'll also be tossing away a ton of information and if you try to edit these files later, you'll see a huge loss in quality.
 
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