What's the best settings for exporting a final copy of your movie in Premiere Pro?

ironpony

Carbonite Member
The best settings for everything, all the way to video codec format, all the way to the audio bitrate. I am using Premiere Pro, and shot on the Canon T2i, so my footage is H.264 I believe. I recorded on the FR2-LE at 24bit/96 khz.
 
There is no such thing as "the best settings".

Different settings for different uses!

A "final copy" doesn't tell me anything, what are you going to do with this final copy?

Archival Master

Internet

Television

Big Screen

DVD

BluRay

Mobile device
 
Okay let's start with big screen and DVD, since I want to have a showing at a local theater, and hand out some DVD copies afterward.
 
Okay let's start with big screen and DVD, since I want to have a showing at a local theater, and hand out some DVD copies afterward.

For 'local theater', what does that mean? Is The Local Theater digital? If so, you should look into producing in Digital Cinema Package format. This package is not based on H.264, Mpeg-4, or any other 'consumer' type media format. The underlying encoding is JPEG-2000, and essentially each frame of a 'movie' is a JPeg-2000 image frame. Since I don't have access to my own private digital theater, I've only looked into a 'open source' version of an DCP authoring tool, just to get an idea of what the process is.

Otherwise many digital theaters can now take Bluray disks, and project them, and so the problem reduces to producing a high bit rate high quality Bluray disk. This is something that if you have the Adobe CS6 program, Encore, you can 'produce' your self... I'll leave it as an exercise for you to go around to your 'friends', who will tell you all manner of misinformation, dysinformation, or correct information which you will misinterpret... to get the details.

A similar process using Encore will provide a DVD output.
 
The local theater is digital, or at least they are showing digital movies. I assume they either show DVDs, blue rays, or they plug in a datacard of some sort and play it off of that. I have CS5 and the Encore that came with that, but have never used it so far. This would be the first I either make myself or get another guy to make that I know who does that, but he needs to know the specs.
 
The local theater is digital, or at least they are showing digital movies. I assume they either show DVDs, blue rays, or they plug in a datacard of some sort and play it off of that. I have CS5 and the Encore that came with that, but have never used it so far. This would be the first I either make myself or get another guy to make that I know who does that, but he needs to know the specs.

I'd suggest learning now...

Off the top of my head, you can actually search the web yourself for these details...

Using Encore, and the Main Concepts encoder.

BD: H.264, Video Bit rate, set min 25 mbs, max 30 mbs. Audio: 196Kbs
DVD: MPeg2, Bit rate, set min 7 mbs, max 8 mbs. Audio: 196Kbs

Since I've not burned a DVD or BD recently these are sort of what I recall... I'd have to look at the menus, then search the web to see what other have done, the burn disks, play them, see if the quality is to my liking, etc.

If you have 'friends' in The Theater, see if you can play samples of the results, to find what is best for their setup.
 
When you make arrangements to rent the local theater, they will tell you what formats they can show. If you're lucky, they will accept a Blu-Ray. You can easily make a Blu-Ray yourself with Encore or Sonic.

If they won't accept a Blu-Ray or DVD, they will need a DCP. That's more complicated. While its possible to make a DCP yourself with inexpensive or even free software, there are complicated color space conversions involved that make it difficult to preview your final result without access to a digital cinema server and projector. Which means that you will need to arrange for them to screen some test reels for you.
 
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You need to know what your target audience to determine what would be the optimal settings for that particular delivery format. To deliver DVD, the best you can d is 720x480 around 9mbps in mpeg2. Its different for bluray h.264. Or if you plan to distribute on YouTube or vimeo? Then it will be h.264 too.
 
Well let's start with blue ray, and theater for film festivals. For theater is is either blue ray or DCP, Arniepix said. For blue ray their is H.264 and H.264 blue ray as well. Do I just pick H.264?
 
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