Exporting HD footage in adobe premire CS3?

Willow01

So Ive been editing and exporting videos with adobe premire pro CS3, and basicly the problem Im running into is the footage starts out with great quality but by the time its exported its kind of grainy and blurry and Ive no idea why. I dont suppose anyone could help me with this?

Can_Solo

Hi Willow, you are going to need to explain a bit more.

What type of footage is going in?
What effects etc are applied on the timeline?
What settings did you use to export?
What media do you intend to end up with, is it DVD?

Willow01

ah okay well it says the properties of the footage before its gone into premiere is:
Video
Frame width:1920
Frame height:1080
Data rate:33806kbps
Total bitrate:35344kbps
Frame rate: 23 frames/second
Audio
Bitrate:1538kbps
Channels:2(stereo)
Audio sample rate: 48kHz

as for effects there isnt much, a couple of titles and and a linear wipe one one clip (for a little cloning thing I did)

em as for export settings:

Format Quicktime
Range: work area

Codec: H.264

Quality: 100
Frame width: 1920
Frame heigth: 1080
fps: 24
Field order:none (progressive)
pixel aspect ratio: square pixels

bitrate kbps: 8000

(I think thats about right I kind of fiddled around with it a little bit before I posted though!)

and I upload to youtube

thanks in advance!

Can_Solo

Ok Willow, I will have a proper look at that when I get home this evening but off the top of the bat;

What actual camera are you using for the footage going into premiere? Do you know what codec? AVCHD? Does the camera give you the option to record HD or SD and if so what settings did you select?

the specs you have listed give a frame rate of 23fps which is not a standard accepted setting so that must be what premiere thinks it is.

I would guess that your footage is coming in within an interlaced wrapper which is common enough for non professional cameras.

As for export settings, quicktime at 100 quality and progressive is definately wrong for web delivery. Get back to me with the answers to the above questions and I will give you some suggested export settings later on.

By the way, you tube will re-encode your video once you upload it anyway, have you tried to view on you tube or just at home?

Willow01

The camera Im using is a canon ixus 220 I havent really got a clue about the codec, it has four shooting options the top two are HD (1920x1080, 1280x720) and the other arent HD at all (640x480, 320x240) Im not sure what AVCHD is tbh!
Ive viewed it on youtube and the quality doesnt seem nearly as good as other vids on youtube that were shot with the same camera

Can_Solo

Hi Willow,

your camera records at 1920x1080 at 24fps at its highest setting.

You should set up your export settings as follows;

format: H264
24fps
progressive
square pixels
VBR 1 pass ( 2 pass if you have lots of spare time )
Target bitrate 6Mbps ( you could try lowering this a little for faster downloading times )
Max Bitrate 9 Mbps

be sure to tick maximum render quality and frame blending.
the frame blending is important here because your camera records in progressive mode but stores it in an interlaced wrapper ( I think ).
This should give you a nice HD video for you tube.

These are the setting I would use in premiere pro cs5, your version cs3 ( which is 5 years old now ) predates my knowledge I am afraid so if there are any differences it could come down to the age of the software. Your camera is much newer than your software. These are not revolutionary settings in comparison to what you are using already, I think frame blending will help a lot other than that you will have to experiment with the bit rate. You are reducing the size of the file by several multiples to prepare it for online delivery and thus a significant loss of quality is expected.

Hope that helps, good luck with it.