How to export a movie without recompressing the source video clips?

[Lothaire]

Hi,

I have been struggling to find a way to export a movie with Adobe
Premiere to produce an output with the exact same quality as the
source clips.

I am working with some avi clips recorded with a digital camera. They
are AVI files encoded with the ISO Mpeg-4 v1.1 codec M4S2.

I'm doing some basic editing, cutting out some parts of the clips and
arranging them onto my timeline.

I have tried all the possible codecs out there for exporting my movie,
and they either produce a tremdously large file or a smaller file but
with a degraded image quality.

I know there are some simple programs out there that let you merge avi
clips encoded in the same format into one single file. So I'm thinking
there must be a way to use the same "trim/merge" approach when editing
a movie in order to produce an output file that has the exact same
data/picture quality/compression rate as the original clips.

Any advice on how to achive that result with Adobe Premiere (or other
software ?).

Thank you for your advice.

Lothaire

[natem]

Post by Lothaire
Hi,
I have been struggling to find a way to export a movie with Adobe
Premiere to produce an output with the exact same quality as the
source clips.
I am working with some avi clips recorded with a digital camera. They
are AVI files encoded with the ISO Mpeg-4 v1.1 codec M4S2.
I'm doing some basic editing, cutting out some parts of the clips and
arranging them onto my timeline.
I have tried all the possible codecs out there for exporting my movie,
and they either produce a tremdously large file or a smaller file but
with a degraded image quality.
I know there are some simple programs out there that let you merge avi
clips encoded in the same format into one single file. So I'm thinking
there must be a way to use the same "trim/merge" approach when editing
a movie in order to produce an output file that has the exact same
data/picture quality/compression rate as the original clips.
Any advice on how to achive that result with Adobe Premiere (or other
software ?).
Thank you for your advice.
Lothaire

You don't seem to have a basic understanding of how video compression
works. By nature, exporting to a compressed format will lower the
quality of the video. If you export to DV-AVI (file > export > movie)
you will maintain quality, but you will produce a large file because
the DV codec encodes produces video that's about 13 gigs per hour.

There are 2 general strategies you can use to compress your footage:

1) Export as DV-AVI (assuming DV footage) and compress with another
application to something like Divx or Xvid. Googling "convert AVI to
<your desired format>" will produce a billion different utilities.

2) Export through Premiere. Regardless of the export format (WMV, QT,
RM, MPEG, FLV) you'll want to adjust the encoding settings. The most
significant settings are the frame size and the bitrate.

The frame size is the pixel dimensions of the resulting movie. Most of
the export presets in Premiere are somewhere around 320x240. DV video
is most commonly edited at 720x480, so by exporting as one of the
presets, you may be producing a video with a smaller frame size than
you may be intending.

The bitrate is your Quality vs. File Size. High bitrates make a larger
file size, but also should produce better looking video. You need to
find the sweet spot where you are balancing quality vs. file size.

It is completely possible to get a great looking compressed export
from Premiere, but you need to be familiar with the encoding options
if you want results. Also, have realistic expectations, exporting from
one compressed format to another will ALWAYS lower the quality of the
result. There is no way around this.

Hope this helps.
Nate