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Adobe Premiere Pro - Advanced Training

Creating your own encoding preset in Media Encoder

Daniel Walter Scott

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Hi there, in this video we're going to look at this preset browser down the bottom, figure out what it all means down here, and we'll create our own preset. This little preset browser down here, basically, it's just a bunch of preset ones that Adobe have made for us. We actually-- it's kind of funny, they look kind of separate, they look very distinctive because they've got little icons. It's the first group of little presets ever, they get their own little icons. 

The difference is we're actually looking at these presets, in a different way. So if I am looking for H.264 Adaptive, I know that I go to 'H.264', and I go into here, and there it is there, down here, it's tucked under, you can never find it, so you type in the Search here, and go "Adaptive", and there it is there, it's under 'Broadcast', and there's my 'High Bitrate'. There's no difference, if you want to find it under 'Broadcast, under 'H.264', and then find it there, and drag it on, you can do it that way. So it's just a kind of a different way of sorting all of this, because this doesn't make a whole lot of sense, you're like, "What does these do?" 

You know, like, when am I ever going to use a Wraptor DCP, that goes out to the cinemas, but you don't know that until you find it over here, let's have a look. Where is it, Cinema, and there's my Wraptor DCP, so it's just a different way of figuring these kind of presets out. Now applying these presets, I showed you Search, that's really handy, you can search for things, if somebody's asked you for a file format, and you're like, "Hmm, sure I can give you the EXR format," and just send them all of these, so Search is useful. Applying them up here is interesting, so let's say that you do decide, that under 'Broadcast' we are using this 'DNX HD', a great kind of like in between editing format, somebody wants that from you, like, "Great, I can do that." 

So I'm going to go to my 1080p and I'm going to go to-- I've been asked for this, so here it is, so I want this plus this. So if I drag it on top of the words, right on top of the words, it replaces it, undo works, great, If I want it to, as well as just drag it on top of the actual name of the file, rather than the name of the preset, can you kind of see the icon changing there, that side to side, somehow means we'll switch a Rooney. This one up here is going to add to it, so depending on what you want to do. 

Now we're not going to cover all of these, because I don't know what all they do. One thing to note is, most of the things like broadcast and cinema, and like Blu-Ray DVD, those are really strict, you know, rules that they have to follow in these presets, so those you can trust because somebody's-- it's very important for the industry, and those are great. Some of the more kind of like social ones, they can get out of date, they seem to be doing better at keeping up with them, and why you would bother using, like why would I export the Facebook 720p, and also the the Twitter 720p, yeah, for a couple of reasons. One is, they'll be different, you can see here, that they've asked for the different target rates, and it might be the difference between, most of them all upload now, for things like this, for social media. 

The difference might be, is processing, have you ever uploaded something to YouTube, and it's like, spends ages trying to re-encode it. Basically, they always try and re-encode it, but if it's, you know, if it's exactly what they want, often it can kind of pass through a lot faster. The other reason is that the processing, that they're probably going to do anyway, they're re-encoding, you're going to send them something, and they're going to redo it anyway, to make it good for them, is that if it's far off what they need, you can end up with like some bad quality issues, as in the format that you send them might be, might just combine badly with the way that, they're going to re-encode it for their platform, that's why you might do these separately. 

I use a generic one and just send them to all of them, because in honesty I don't see the difference, and I'm not in the quality game. A lot of the stuff I do is going up to social media, that kind of throw away stuff, it's not high-end movie trailers, and that might be your game. So you might be exporting these all separately, just to get the best out of all of it. If you spend millions of dollars on visual effects, rolling the dice with the encoder on the platforms is not what you want to do. So do check in here, make sure they update, we talked about it kind of earlier. A lot of these ones, like these broadcast ones are super helpful for me, because I don't have a lot of experience here. 

So when they do ask for settings, I can either ask for them, and the helpful people can export me their version, if they're using Premiere Pro, or I can get their spec sheet, and I can find, often, what I need in here. The difference between Mac and PC is interesting, you will see other, on Mac it's all ProRes stuff because it's all Apple. If you're on a PC, depending on when you are in the future, or what version of Premiere Pro, they do change these often, rearrange them, but you'll find some specific ones that might be important to you. You'll find, like the Windows format, that's, you know, that weird, not weird but it's an older format, that only plays on Windows, you might be needing that, it might be optimal for your workflow, you will find that in other, or again, just type it at the top here, it should dig it out for you. 

The last thing is setting up groups, so let's make a group, let's do this for my, say podcasts. So I record podcasts both in video and audio, and I edit them in Premiere Pro, even though it's like-- we've seen it's quite powerful for audio, so do it in this, and then what you can do is you can, I export both the video version because we did talking head stuff, and the audio versions at the same time. So let's go in and let's type in "wave", so I've got, there it is there, under Audio Only, I'm going to do my wave, I'm going to stick it in to my podcasts, I'm going to turn that off. 

What else do I want in there? I want my Adaptive, whatever you're using, I'm going to do a high res version and a low version, and also, often you-- like one other kind of preset in here I get, you asked for all the time is, let's say, you know, I'm dealing with somebody, who only wants movs, I'm like, "Why?" They're like, because we only want movs, because they're hoping for, like Prores 422 or something else, their uploader won't accept anything, but 422. I know that I need it to be mp4, but I can re-wrap it by doing something like, where is it? 

Let's have a look, mov, oh, can't just type in mov, I think it's in brackets, mov, no, rewrap, there it is. There it is, it's under Broadcast, QuickTime, and I can rewrap and it's just basically, it's not changing the codec, I'm just going to re-wrap it with the .mp4, then close down my little searchy thing, and now I've got this one, I can say, "Great, I've got this," let's drag it on top of the name here, and I've got all these ready to go. This is a bit of a bloated example, you might just have two, and it's worth creating a little preset group, so you can just dump it on there every time, rather than having a fish round in here, or go into this, and go and change it all. 

To create your own preset, it's similar to what we did earlier on, when we're creating proxy presets, but let's cover again quickly here, 'Create New Preset', 'Encoding' is what you want. These two here, we'll cover this again, I think we need to cover these again a little bit in an upcoming video, but let's just look at encoding. It's funny, the word export, encoding, rendering, transcoding, mostly, when mostly people are using it, they all mean the same thing, creating a file out of Premiere Pro. 

They have slight differences but basically they're all interchangeable, when most people use them. Rendering and coding are pretty close, transcoding kind of means, when we're shifting it from one codec to another, like we did with our proxies, we go from like an h.264 to say a ProRes, so that we can edit it faster, we're kind of like transcoding, exporting, they're, yeah, they're all interchangeable-ish. So my new preset is going to be H.264, I need some sort of-- I'm going to do, I need something that's kind of in between high and medium, I'm going to start with medium, kind of get everything kind of going, then here I'm going to say, actually, I'm going to do a 'Variable Bitrate 2', and let's say that I need something like 4 and 6. 

Give it a name, click 'OK', and you'll see, mine's kind of ended up, where is it? End up in the wrong place, so I'm going to drag it out into my user presets, and close those groups down. So that's creating your own preset, and that is about all the value I can add from the preset browser. All right, let's get on to the next video.