File Size Blowout...

[Raniburger]

Hi Guys,

I have a problem when exporting my .mpg files captured from my DV Camcorder. Using Premiere Pro, the only option available to me when I export my movie is to convert to .avi. For some reason this increases the file size significantly (almost doubles), even though the length of the edited file is somewhat shorter.

I am wanting to then import my edited clip into a different Premiere project, and ultimately burn the finished product to a DVD - however each 2 minute clip is taking up just under half a Gigabyte of hard disk space (the original file is only about 150Mb). Obviously it won't take too long until the size of these files blow-out, and I don't have unlimited space on my hard drive.

Is there any way to export my clip in the same format as it is captured (ie .mpg?) If not, is there some way I can keep the file size down? I haven't done anythng other than make a few cuts & joins - so I can't figure out why the file size continues to blow out...

Any help is appreciated. Thanks...

[mats.hogberg]

Get more HDD space. If you do have a DV camcorder, keep everything DV until your final edit, when you export as mpg. DV is huge, yes, but if you repeatedly import and export you'll lose (IMO too much) quality if you export to highly compressed formats.

/Mats

[guns1inger]

Is there any way to export my clip in the same format as it is captured

Yes, and the manual or help files will tell you how.

[Raniburger]

Thanks Mats,

I have two other issues though:

1. Why is the output generated bigger than the original file? Surely there must be a way to preserve quality whilst not enlarging the file size.
2. These small clips are only used for PIP purposes - and are not the main video stream. Even though I can buy more hard disk space - I can't increase the available space on the DVD's. I would prefer not to compress the final encoded product so much if possible.

All I want to do I guess is export the project to .mpg (source) format, so as to preserve quality whilst not blowing out the file size...

Thanks again...

[guns1inger]

1. Different codecs require different bitrates in order to have equivelent quality. For instance, Divx can look as good as the original DVD at around half the bitrate, and still look good at around a quarter the bitrate.

2. Recompressing mpeg usually results in lower quality than the original, even if the same bitrate is used. Mpeg is a delivery format, and doesn't like being re-encoded. Again, read you manual to work out how to use the adobe media encoder (big hint) to produce mpeg output from premiere pro.

[mats.hogberg]

1) The only (slight simplification) export format that will not reduce quality is uncompressed, and that's really huge.
There's no correlation between "keeping file" size and "keeping quality". If you have a highly compressed video, load it into an editor , then save out again using exactly the same settings as the original, it will look considerably worse.
Take a picture, and repeatedly save it as jpg using highest compression, each cycle using the last save as "source" - You'll see how it gets worse for each save, while the file size stays the same.
Only way to repeatedly edit it without losing some in each edit is to save it as BMP (uncompressed) between edits, and save out as JPG only when all edits are done.
2)Once you have all video, (huge) looking like you want, then you do a final encode at a bitrate that allows you to fit what you want on the media you want.

/Mats