Exporting a full-length film

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Denialorcoped

Well-known member
I'm only making a 30-40 min film, it took me damn near 20 minutes to export the 3 min. title sequence.

I'm getting a little worried that come time it is all done, Premiere will crash when trying to export the whole thing. Anyone have experience doing such a lengthy export?

I have a fast computer, and using Premiere CS5, I'm just worried the about the program not being able to handle the export.
 
Unless it crashes during export on short clips, I wouldn't worry about it crashing on export on your 30-40 minute file. I recently exported three 6-7 hour live-switched videos of a client's webcast with no errors... it just took a bloody long time. Run it overnight, or sometime when you can let that box sit for a while, and see what happens. It should take about 4.5 hours to export at that rate. (That seems a bit long, though... are you exporting at the same settings as your timeline, or are your compressing the footage to a different codec while exporting?)
 
I just bring the AVCHD files into CS5, and export it at 1920x1080, square pixels using the cineform codec. I suppose when it's done I'll want to export to a mpeg-4 for bluray, but I imagine it'd take the same time.

It's taking longer cause my clips have a lot of plugins on them (looks, colorista, and others)
 
converting to cineform after doing effects sounds the wrong way round to me, will that still take advantage of cineforms 4:2:2 colourspace? - also cineform rendering is always quite a slow affair but nothing like the time you report - if you converted to cineform then put your effects on it may speed things up & take advantage of cineform
 
I used to use neoscene to convert to cineform, but once I got CS5 I really enjoyed just bringing in the native files right away since it's so much faster and saves me so much hd space; plus it saves one step of conversion which may improve the overall resolution.

I don't really know much bout the 4:2:2 colourspace; The footage I am exporting looks good. Are you suggesting I should go back to my old way of using Neoscene?
 
i guess if it looks good to you then no need to change, but one of the benefits of transcoding to cineform has always been that it holds up to colour correction & other manipulation better than native avchd does. I understand wanting to reduce the file sizes & cs5 does a fine job of editing avchd straight off the timeline - it just seems strange to hear some one using a lot of effects on avchd footage & then rendering to cineform. But as i say if you're happy with the results then why not.
I do think it is the converting to cineform with effects heavy avchd that is giving you these long export times. Do you have a mercury playback engine enabled graphics card - this has made a huge difference to me in rendering time?
It would also be interesting to see if it took any longer & what the quality difference is compared with your method - to export your avchd timeline as cineform before you used any plugins, & then applied your effects to the cineform footage - 2 stages of rendering instead of one & you would end up with an extra cineform file - but if rendering times are an issue i have found that exporting cineform footage with effects applied takes about twice as long as the length of the timeline, with mercury engine on my computer (i7 overclocked to 4ghz, 6gb ram, gts450 with mercury hack). Have just exported a 30 minute documentary & it took an hour to render cineform footage that had levels adjustment & minor colour correction
For quick simple projects i edit with the native avchd, but for more involved work where i know i will be applying changes to the look of the footage & will be using after effects, i transcode 1st to cineform before i edit - i may try a little test myself to see if exporting avchd off the timeline into cineform takes any longer & has any effect on quality - would be a way of saving on hdd space i guess.
 
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You're currently transcoding on export... that's going to take a LONG time compared to transcoding on import, editing, exporting a reference file and then compressing to your delivery format. The way you're doing it will still get the job done, it'll just take significantly longer.

I would also advise transcoding from AVCHD to Cineform (or another intermediate/editing friendly 4:2:2 codec like ProRes422) BEFORE editing, applying effects, and color correcting. When it's time to export, kick out a reference file and compress from there to whatever your delivery format will be.
 
Quicktime Reference File. It's a much lighterweight way of exporting a beefy timeline like the one you're working on with effects, color correction, etc applied... but I believe that Premiere can't do QTRef, just Avid and Final Cut... so nevermind. :( Sorry!
 
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