Windows Media Video Compression Using Adobe Premiere Pro

I have written this tutorial for anyone who uses Adobe Premiere Pro and wants to find out the best way to compress a video using “Windows Media Video”.

I cover things like what bitrate to use with what resolution and framerate, as well as what some of the different settings do and mean. Find out for yourself and read…

(you won’t have to copy and paste the image URLs into your browser)

How to get to Adobe Media Encoder

1. Process all raw footage if you haven’t already done so in Premiere Pro

two. Now go, File >> Export >> Adobe Media Encoder

3. Select “Windows Media” from the format drop down list

Four. Then from the preset dropdown select something like “WMV9 720 25p” (it doesn’t really matter what you choose)

video settings

1. Select “Video” on the left side of Adobe Media Encoder

two. Under Video, make sure…

• Select “Windows Media Video 9” as codec
• Leave “Allow interlaced processing” unchecked
• Under Bitrate Settings, select “Two” pass encoding and make sure the mode is “Variable Constrained”. This offers much better results compared to a single encoding step.

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audio settings

1. Select “Audio” on the left side of Adobe Media Encoder

two. Under Audio, make sure…

• Select “Windows Media Audio 9.1” as the audio codec
• Under Bitrate Settings, select “Two” pass encoding and make sure the mode is set to “Constant”. This will ensure that the audio quality remains the same throughout the video.

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Audience Settings

1. Select “Audiences” on the left side of Adobe Media Encoder

two. The audiences are the most important part, as this is where you really set the quality and file size.

3. Now select the frame rate you want; it is usually best to keep it at its original level. But let’s say your original level is 50 frames per second, reduce it to 25. If you’re after a really small file, you’ll want to reduce your fps to 20 or 15, but 25 will always improve the footage as it will appear much smoother.

Four. For Pixel Aspect Ratio, set it to whatever your original footage is set to. If you’re editing footage shot on the computer, square pixels will give you the best results.

5. The width and height of the frame are an important factor when considering image quality with file size. You need to join them both. In theory, for simple scenes like a close-up of a human face, “1 bit” per 200 pixels will give good results, you can even try 250 pixels per bit. But with a more complex scene including perhaps landscapes and bushes or a fast action video etc, you’ll want to aim for around “1 bit” per 100 pixels (nowhere more than 140 pixels per bit). To figure this out, simply watch all the scenes in your video. If your scenes vary a lot in terms of color and complexity, then you want fewer pixels per bit, this will increase the file size (or reduce the image size), but will give better results otherwise. On the other hand, if your video contains long interviews with a fixed background. Then the compressor will be able to produce good results with a high pixel-per-bit rate.

6. Now coming down to the basic audio settings, if your video contains a lot of sound and sound is really important in the video. So you don’t want to go below 96kb/s but normally I prefer to use 160kb/s or 128kb/s as if you compare 160kb/s bitrate of audio to 5000 bitrate of video you can see that the the audio won’t affect the file size much in this case. The higher the bitrate of your video, the less impact the audio will have on the file size. Use CBR audio, not CBR (A/V) audio. Use stereo if your sound differs from channel to channel (most music does).

7. Back to the video now, set the decoder complexity to Auto

8. For keyframe interval, if you have a high-action video with complex scenes, set it to about 1 or 2. On the other hand, if you have not-so-complex scenes like an interview with a fixed background, then you can turn it up. to about 10.

9. Leave the default buffer size

10 Now here’s the good stuff. Because earlier, we set a video encoding mode to two-pass encoding with variable but constrained bitrate. This means that we can now give a maximum and average bitrate. It will use the maximum bitrate for more complex scenes and use the average bitrate for normal scenes. Now setting your bitrate is important. This is basically where we cram all of our resolution and other data into one compactly packed file. If you pack your file tight, bits of data start coming out of the corners, so it’s important to pack your video tight, but not too tight. Let’s say we have a fairly complex video that is fairly fast-paced with lots of different colors and scenes. We set our resolution to 1024×768 with a frame rate of 25 and want excellent quality but a small file size.

Ok, let’s put what we learned into play. Ok, 1024 multiplied by 768 gives us 786000 pixels. That means each frame will contain 786000 pixels. If our video is running at 25fps, that’s 19.2 million pixels per second. The way compressors work is that they look for similarities between multiple frames and try to share the data. Sometimes when you set the bitrate too low, it just can’t handle that data, so you need to throw away some pixels. The lower the bitrate, the more pixels will be thrown or broken.

eleven Now, we have to set the bitrate. So seeing our scene is quite complex and we want good quality, I think 130 pixels per bit will be fine. So let’s divide 786000 by 130. This gives us 6040 bits. So 6000 bits per second is what we need. We will set 6000 as peak and 5000 as average. Now, 5000 bits per second will produce a fairly large file in internet terms, but remember, we’re using 1024×768 resolution which is very large in internet terms, but we want viewers to see “all” of the work we do. have put into it.

12 Now once the bitrate is set we have our buffer size, the higher your bitrate, the larger your buffer size. In this case, a buffer of 20/25 will be fine (buffering generally doesn’t affect anything).

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saving

1. Now save the preset purchase by pressing the floppy disk icon at the top of the Adobe Encoder window. But, before you do that, put a comment for the preset if you like.

two. Now, hit OK at the bottom of the window, which will then ask you for a location to save it. It will also give you an estimated file size based on the length of your video and your maximum data rate (for both video and audio). But since we’re using a variable bitrate, this estimate is usually higher than the final result.

3. Let it process, then enjoy.

tips

• It’s usually good to set your workspace to 5 seconds duration over a complex part of your video, that way you can do test renders to find the best bitrate.
• If you’re getting errors when exporting and you’re using a hyper-threading or dual-core processor, visit this site to troubleshoot the problem. If you don’t have this problem, it might be a good idea to visit the site and get the new Adobe Media Encoder. [http://www.adobe.com/support/techdocs/330380.html]

I hope you have learned something from this Smiley tutorial.

Health!

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