Whirlwind Premiere: Exporting The Movie

The Premiere process we wish to execute is an Export. You can find it in the File menu. In particular, we wish to export to a media file.

The Export Settings dialog box will appear. While you were asked to specify project characteristics such as screen resolution and output format when you started the project, it turns out that those were provisional specifications. You can change them here if you need to. However, whatever you set for values here will determine how big your resulting media file is and much about how it looks.

Premiere allows you to establish a "timeline viewport" (defining a smaller section of the timeline) called a "Work Area". You could use this to export fragments of the larger project to test, but in the end You want to be sure you are exporting the "Entire Sequence" as shown in the lower left of the image here.

In the upper right you need to review (and possibly change) the Export settings. The image here reveals changes appropriate to this class (Format: H.264 and Preset: NTSC DV).

This might also be a good time to give your movie a name.

In the bottom right quadrant of the dialog box there is a tabbed-interface area that gives you access to various detailed settings. In particular, it shows a Video and an Audio tab. Let's start with the Video tab...

Here's your last chance to adjust the frame size, and playback frame rate for the finished movie. The value of 29.97 is the value for broadcast TV, but you can choose other values for a digital video clip.

There is also an Audio tab in the lower right quadrant. You can use it to fine-tune your audio settings. (Use the Export Audio checkbox in the upper area to indicate whether you have audio or not. Use this to give audio details.)

The important Audio settings include the "Format" (aka codec), the "Sample Rate" and the "Channels".

Format
Some codecs are proprietary (licensed). Our installation seems to only include AAC, which is fine.

Sample Rate
Lower sample rates take up less space but with some sacrifice in sound quality. If the playback target has relatively low quality sound (desktop PC) or if your sound assets weren't created with high-enough sound quality to start with it might not be worth it to use a high sample rate.

Channels
Choose between 1 channel (monophonic) and 2 channels (stereo). Again, if the original sound is mono, there's no point in choosing stereo here (you can still play it in both ears), and two channels use up twice as much disk space as one, and the Audio is often larger than Video in the final file.

You have set and checked all the "packaging" details. It's time for the final choice--render now (while you wait) or render later (using a separate application). This choice will make more sense if you think about producing an entire TV show or documentary in a production environment, where rendering might be done on a different machine, etc.

Queue
Use this option to render "later" (it'll actually launch the "Encoder" application immediately in our case. We'll talk about that in a second, but for now ...

Export
Use this option to render out your movie NOW! It may take several seconds or even minutes, but when it stops, it's done.

If you opt to "queue" the export, Premiere writes up a "work request" for a separate program called "Adobe Media Encoder". This program contains the rendering guts of Premiere, but no editing interface.

Premiere launches the Media Encoder, which will display the dialog shown here.

NOTE!
It isn't actually processing your job yet. You need to click on the File menu and choose "Start Queue" to begin processing (as shown in the second image).