Compressing Video for the Web Using Premiere Pro 2

One of the nice features to Premiere Pro 2 is the handy-dandy, newly re-designed Adobe Media Encoder. Designed to compete with Apple's Compressor that ships with Final Cut Pro, the AME pulls off all the same tricks as Compressor for the PC. (As such, if you have the new version of Compressor, then you can follow along with this tutorial, even though the GUI layout will be different.)

Since there are so many options in AME, I thought I would write a little article on how to export a clean and nice looking video for the web that won't be 28 MB in size. (Trust me, this is very hard to figure out without a little bit of training.) Any of the options that I will discuss in this article can be tweaked and customized to your personal taste and/or needs. This is designed to simply provide you with a proven guideline that you can then work out from.

To begin, open up the file that you wish to export in Adobe Premiere Pro 2. Then go to the File Menu in the upper right and select Export>Adobe Media Encoder.

The export settings box will open up. Before you get into messing around with the other settings, you should decide if there's any part of your footage that you don't need to be including in your coversion. Be aware that there is no frame-safe area in Internet video. This means that those black bars that tend to be on the side of your footage which aren't visible in a TV screen are blatantly visible if you don't crop them out.

Another part that's good to crop out is letterbox bars, as keeping them in results in larger file sizes and your cropped footage will be the aspect range you intend anyway. Flip between your Source and Output, with the 'Scale to Fit' option turned on in your output viewer. (You can further customize your output by going into the Basic Video Settings panel and changing the size from the default 320 px by 240 px size. Be aware that you will get an error if you choose an odd pixel count. Adobe Media Encoder only deals with even numbers of pixels.)

After this, go over to the Export settings and make sure that your format has Windows Media selected. After that, pull open the Preset menu. Scroll down to WM9 NTSC 256K Download. (This has nothing to do with streaming, rather Download is the suggested use for this type of file.)

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