rendering problems/questions

[curt y]

I am trying real hard to like Premier Elements, but having problems out of the shute.

I took a 11 meg .avi and put into PE and then chose share and computer. There I saved it as an .avi, mpeg, and wmv. That saved as 221 mb, 51 mb, and 3.6 mb. I used the default setting for the saves.

Why does the AVI change from 11 to 221 megs when saved as an AVI, and 51 mb as a mpeg? In addition all the saved clips are unusable. There is a latency that looks almost like 2 layers of the person playing tennis.

My expectation is to take a 11 meg file and get somewhat the same size output of nearly the same quality. In my AVS editor I took the same 11 meg file and rendered it to AVI and it came out the same size and similar quality. Used the h.264 format.

What am I doing wrong?

[Chuck Engels]

Hi Curt,
AVI is just a container for a large number of codecs/formats, H.264 is just one of them.
My guess is that the original AVI is probably H.264 while Premiere Elements AVI is a DV-AVI or Microsoft AVI format, 13gb per hour of footage is the file size. This AVI is not very compressed and it is the native format for Premier Elements.

To get an H.264 format/codec file then you should use the Quicktime option and go into the Advanced properties and choose the H.264 codec. Most of us have learned to not use the default options provided by Adobe, they generally need to be tweaked a little in the advanced properties section.

I don't understand why you would want to export the file to begin with, what is the purpose? Especially to get the same format and the same size, I don't understand the reasoning for that. It is very seldom necessary to export your project until you are finished and then usually not to the same format as you started with.

[curt y]

Thanks for your input.

I am running a test to see if I can survive on Premier Elements, I am working with the trial version. The test is to see if I can get a video file to save with similar file size and quality. If I take a 11 meg file and the best I can do to get similar quality is a file that is 2 to 20 times its size then the program probably will not work for me. I tried the same test with a wmv file and go the same results. Big files and extremely poor quality.

So if I have a .wmv file can you recommend what settings I would need, or some resource to look at to get me there? Have not ordered a book as do not know if program will suit me.

It is really difficult to get it to open with all the screens it wants filled out, and I hate to give them info.

[Chuck Engels]

What length is the video? Depending in the length it may not be possible to get the file to 11mb or less.
What preset exports have you already tried? Can you post a sample of the original and what your export looks like so we can get an idea of how bad, bad is?

We really need to know exactly what you are trying, step by step. From the time you click the Share tab, what do you do next?

[curt y]

Here is a screen shot of a 2.6 m clip (43 seconds) I cut off a longer video. Frame size 320 x 240

The codec is WMV3, and I saved it as a wmv. Preset was cable modem, DSL

One can see a double image, where one layer is shifted as seen clearly by the fence posts across the pond.

Probably a simple fix, but where?

I assume the Premier Elements does not have a direct copy function where a video can be edited, but not re-rendered. Have seen this in only Virtual Dub.

[Steve Grisetti]

Much has to do with your source footage, Curt. And if you're using a H.264-AVI to build this project in Premiere Elements you're going to get very poor results.

What kind of camcorder is your video originating in? There is likely a more direct way - and a more appropriate project preset -- that will give you much cleaner results.

BTW, I hope the book you've ordered is our Muvipix.com Guide! Most of this is in there!

[curt y]

Much of my footage is downloaded from the web, is in wmv format, and therefore of mediocre quality. But that is OK for my needs.

What I don't understand is that the other cheap video editors seem to handle it just fine. I can get a rendered clip of similar size and quality.

But with Premier Elements the file is huge and the quality is so poor it is unusable. I am on the trial version and have not yet gotten your book as I am not sure if PE is usable for me.

I am trying to find out if there are settings within PE that can be made to give good results. Surely if a free editor can do it, PE should be able to do it also. As one can see in my post above the image has the impression of two layers slightly offset from each other.

If I can resolve these issues I will buy PE and your book also.

[Chuck Engels]

What you see in your video is interlacing. I believe that Premiere Elements 9, in most cases, does not deinterlace the footage.
That would be a very bad bug in the program.

[curt y]

That is what I figured, but tried several different videos from different sources , in both avi and wmv, and they all came out the same.

I contribute to some of the adobe help forums, and know that the trial is the same as the purchased program, although some features my be truncated. Seems like this is just a basic feature it would not be truncated. Any thoughts?

[Bob]

Your screenshot shows a lot of interlacing artifacts. That can happen if the field order of an interlaced video file doesn't match the field order of the project preset. Try this: right click on the clip in the timeline and select "field options". Then check the box next to "reverse field dominance". Does that help, or does it make it worse?

WMV is considered a distribution format. Distribution formats are highly compressed to make the file sizes smaller and are generally not intended to be edited and produce less satisfactory results than formats that are designed to be edited, such as the ones that come directly from a video camera. Your source is very highly compressed, probably something on the order of 100:1. If you export to a less compressed format, such as DV-AVI which is only compressed 5:1, your file will be much larger. In this example, 20 times larger. That's not Premiere Elements fault, that's simple math. If you want similar sized output files you will need to export to a more highly compressed format and adjust the bitrate/compression.

One more thing, DV-AVI and AVI are not the same thing. AVI is a container format that simply defines how the content is stored in the file. The content is defined by the codec used to compress the content and there are many different codecs. DV-AVI is an AVI file using a very specific codec (DV). DV-AVI is fixed at a 5:1 compression. AVI can use much more highly compressed codecs including those based on MPEG compression. AVI files using highly compressed codecs are also considered distribution formats.

[curt y]

Try this: right click on the clip in the timeline and select "field options". Then check the box next to "reverse field dominance". Does that help, or does it make it worse?

I tried this and it made no difference. In this same window under Processing Options "none" was checked.