What is Premiere Doing @ File - Export - To Movie?

[greymalkin]

I recently captured a video as an uncompressed avi in virtuadub and loaded it up in premiere for some editing...one thing I noticed is the playback of the file in premiere was very choppy although it isn't in wmp or virtuadub...also, when I used File - Export - To Movie..I assumed it was saving it back to it's original .avi format...well it took about 8 hours to render this 30 minute video (on my P4 3ghz w/1gb RAM) and I noticed 2 things about the file it created:

1) The file was about 3.5gb instead of the 35gb it originally was.
2) The quality was terrible..very block and looked like that color information had been stripped down..like when you change a 16-bit image to 256 colors.

now I know it's because of something silly I did..so I'm wondering how should I do this in the future?

thanks

[garrisonkw]

Premiere typically saves to DV avi. If you had a truly uncompressed avi, maybe you could use virtualdubmod to first convert it to DV. I like to use the Panasonic DV codec.

[dipstick]

If you clicked Export > Movie, then click the "Settings" button on the lower right. This will tell you what codec it is saving as. It's likely to Microsoft DV-AVI. If you want to save it as Uncompresed RGB, then choose "Microsoft AVI > then click on Video (upper left) and choose Uncompressed. I recomend installing Huffyuv and using it instead. Same great quality, but smaller size.

[greymalkin]

will huffyYUV give me smoother playback on the timeline? When I imported DV and even mpeg2 directly into the timeline before everything played pretty smoothly, I guess the huge size of the uncompressed .avi combined with the other things it's doing is too much for it.

thanks for the great suggestions.

[edDV]

What was your project setting in Premiere?

It tends to default to DV format for a software only install. Any media imported will be "conformed" to the project format. The file may not be fully conformed until you do a full render/preview depending on settings.

Conforming an uncompressed file to DV will take many hours since there is no hardware assist by this method. That is why users preferred a partial preview conform until they had narrowed the clips of interest to the timeline. At any time, the timeline can be rendered for full resolution preview. If not fully conformed, playback will be choppy as Premiere attempts to fake a preview.

Bottom line: make sure you set your project format to what you want or you will be wasting many many hours of CPU processing.