Blog Post 81 - Stage 3 - Completed Video - Exporting

Rendering

As previously mentioned at the end of Blog Post 79, now that I have edited, compiled and added various effects and transitions to a whole host of both sourced footage and original footage, and most importantly now that I was happy with the end result of this work, I was able to move onto exporting my promotional video. At this point in time it was very important to revert back to the specification that was set out for this part of the assignment, as to ensure that I made the correct decisions when exporting the video. In the first place, I feel that it is worth mentioning the reason as to why I am exporting the video - by exporting the video this meant that I would then be able to play my video back using software such as QuickTime Player or VLC Media Player, and would save having to open up the Premiere file to play the video as this is not ideal.

Looking back to the specification it stated that "Create a short (1 minute) promotional video for your finished package. This must be edited in Premiere, and you may import previously created elements from Photoshop or Illustrator. You will be expected to demonstrate, at minimum, import images and video, setting up a Premiere project with the right frame size and frame rate (and widescreen), trimming clips, adding transitions to clips, and adding titles over clips. You will submit this video as a Quicktime movie file encoded with the DV codec." and therefore this is something that I will definitely adhere to when exporting my video. In particular, I must ensure that my video is the right frame size, frame rate, widescreen, QuickTime Movie File and with a DV Codec encoded.

Export Settings

Prior to exporting my promotional video, I decided that I would just revisit and play back my video once more to ensure that I was happy with all of the different elements that I had in place and there was not anything that I wanted to change. Navigating to Sequence -> Render Entire Work Area this meant that Premiere would render all of the clips and audio in the timeline, and this was necessary due to the changes that I had been making. Once done, this meant that I could then play back my video to get a true idea of what the end result of the video would be.

Once happy, I navigated to File -> Export -> Media... which meant that I was now presented with a large screen that gave me with a whole host of different options that I could go ahead and change to my choosing. To begin with, it was important to stick to that of the assignment specification and for this reason I went ahead with choosing the Format to be of QuickTime with the Preset being PAL DV Widescreen - both these settings match that of the assignment specification as can be seen above. 

Encoding Sequence

Also, I decided to make use of the use Maximum Render Quality too, as this meant that Premiere gives a better quality scaling, although the one drawback is that of an increased rendering time, although the extra wait should be worth it from the results of the increased quality. In regards to other options that I could change on the Export Settings, one of these was the Source Scaling, which is in relation to the appearance of source footage in the output frame. I decided to choose that of Scale To Fit as I felt this gave the best appearance and did not unnecessary skew the appearance of the video unlike that of the other option to stretch to fill.

With these options chosen, and the video then encoded, I was then able to play this back without the need of Premiere. To test this I decided to make use of an open source piece of software called VLC Media player, which when tested allowed me to successfully play back my video and therefore I can confirm that the exporting of the video had been a success.

Exported and Playing in VLC Media Player

Having now exported my video this means that I am now ready to move onto my final part of this stage of the assignment, which is in regards to the evaluation of Stage 3.