Hello friends,

I am trying to export edited HDV footage from my Canon HV20 using Premiere Elements 3 into an MPEG-2 file. The original footage was captured by PE directly from the camera, and it came in with a .mpeg extension (an mpeg transport stream). This mpeg has amazing quality both in sharpness and colour. After trimming it down from 20 minutes to 5 minutes using PE, I exported it as an MPEG. I chose the best quality settings. But the output was disappointing. The sharpness is gone, and the video looked much contrasty (is that the right term?) than the original. The output file has a huge size as well - almost 100 MB for each minute of video.

I also tried to export it as an AVI. This time the sharpness was better, but the video still looked 'contrasty'. Worse .. I got a 4GB avi file for just 5 minutes of video!!

I've seen videos (.mpg and .mov) people posted elsewhere in this forum, that have a reasonable size per minute and also a great picture quality. I'm wondering what's their trick? Does it have anything to do with codec selection? If that's the case, what is the best codec out there for MPG or MOV conversion?

Another question. Is there a way to export the edited footage in the same format as the original footage? That is, cut the original into bits and stitch them together without any compression or conversion.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Btw, I'm using Windows XP on a 3.4 GHz Pentium-4 CPU and 1.2 GB RAM.

It seems most of the users in this group are Apple folks using FCP. If somebody can actually put up a mini tutorial on how to capture, edit and export HD video on a Windows PC, that would help many novices like me.

- anil.

Hi Anil,

If you have captured footage as M2t or mpeg (which are the same..You can rename our .M2t to .mpeg and they will play in windows media player, and you can also rename mpeg to m2t if you like...dont know why you would :) )

Anyway..if you have edited your footage and want to export as the original format..click on timeline..go to FILE/Export/adobe media encoder..select MPEG2 as your format, selct your preset eg: HDV 1080i 25 (or 30)..make sure your quality is set to 5.. Check the quality by scrubbing through the timeline on the bottom left ( you may need to tick "Interlaced") Should look spoton!.Hit OK and set a name for the file, and you will also have to type in the file extension of .m2t....eg: edited_footage.m2t, and hit save.

Hope its helped.

EDIT...If I want to export quicktime movie..I use export movie (ctrl-m) and choose quicktime and use the sorenson 3 codec, making sure you resize for correct aspect...1440-1080 would have to be set as 1920-1080 set pixel aspec to 1, otherwise QT will squash the image. I usually half the total output size to 960-540.

I have made many video tutorials for other software and have them posted on a site..I think I will make one for Premiere 2 PC users, although it might be a few videos...

Hi Ivan,

thank you very much :-) It works. I also played around with various bitrate settings while keeping the quality setting to the highest. The idea was to bring the output file down to a reasonable size. To me, 1 MB per second is reasonable for 1080i but the best I could get was about 1.25 MB per second. So I got a 20 MB .m2t file for 16 seconds of quality video - not too bad.

I'll do some googling on GOP settings and mess with them this evening. Hopefully that will help me reach my target of 1 MBPS.

I haven't tried your recommendation on exporting to .mov yet.

Thanks again,
- anil.