Quote:
Originally posted by FlyingIguana
no i meant to reduce the time spent playing with settings. so much shit to change around i just give up.
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I hear that! There seems to be more parameters on MPEG encoding than there are windows settings on my computer.
I had a dickens of a time looking to encode my DV clips for web distribution, especially with the additional requirement of batch capability. What I came up with was ligos' LSX-MPEG Adobe Premiere Plug-in, available for $250 from
http://www.ligos.com/index.phtml?pi=152.
I preprocess the clips using Virtual Dub, filtering with a smart smoother and xsharpener first (to reduce video noise in the original caused by marginally lighted night scenes), reducing the size to 360x240, adding my web url bug and saving it in uncompressed avi (to keep artifacts at a minimum). This is a batch process done while I sleep.
Next, open Premiere 6 and go to Projects -> Utilities -> Batch Processing. Add a single AVI file, which will open the "Export Movie Settings" dialogue box.
Under "General" settings, if your plug in was installed correctly, you'll have the option "LSX-MPEG Encoder" in your "File Type" drop down list. Choose that and go to "Advanced Settings". Choose "MPEG-2" as "Output Type", "Bit Rate set to "Variable" at "800 KBS" and "Rate control modes" set to "Constant quantization scale" to "3".
Under "Video" settings, "Frame size" should be "352x240" (352 instead of 360, which is not divisible by 16!). Frame rate can be varied according to how smooth the action is through the clip- since I use a handheld camcorder with a LOT of movement, I have to keep it at 24 FPS.
Under "Audio" settings, choose "Rate" and "Format" at the top most settings unless you're doing music or have some other reason to expend more bandwidth on sound. "Compressor" must be set to "MPEG Layer 2 Audio".
Under "Key Frame and Rendering", set "Fields" to "No Fields".
Everything else is to be left at default values.
This will render a 30 second, 352x240 clip at a little over 3 MBs without any complaints from my viewers. You can tweak these parameters to suite yourself and save the workable solutions from the "Settings" dialogue box to load later.
To batch process as many clips as needed- put them all in the same directory with nothing else, open Premiere 6 and go to Projects -> Utilities -> Batch Processing, click "Add...", go to the directory and at the bottom of the dialogue box you can "Select that directory". Load your previously saved "Settings", hit "Make" and go back to sleep!
I use the same set up to make QuickTime movies of comparable size and quality and offer both to my Membership, btw. This has completely ended any complaints of "I can't view your movies"...
