Scale down 4k to HD when exporting to Media Encoder & Premiere

Hey there, I've got some 4K footage that I want to export, as just a little old HD, a smaller size, and I want to do it while I'm exporting it, rather than trying to resize it all here in Premiere Pro. I do this, often I've got some places that I share videos with, that don't currently accept 4K, so even though I'll edit in 4K, I need to actually scale it down for them, and instead of like duplicating the sequence and trying to scale it all down, I can just do it when I export; let me show you how. 

If you haven't already, in our footage, we've got, this one called Clouds UHD, let's make a sequence from it, because it is, it's size is - let me scroll across - it should be UHD, or 4K. So I need to export it. So I'm going to do the same thing, I'm going to have it selected down here in my Timeline, or have the sequence selected up here in the Project Window, then use my shortcut, 'Command M' on a Mac, 'Ctrl M' on a PC. I'm going to say, you, my friend are going to go get queued, and a good place to start is, under here it should be-- it depends on the last thing you said, but Match Source - High Bitrate is a nice good place to get started, and then let's click on the word 'Match Source'. 

At the moment it's going to come out, under 'Video Settings', you can see it's going to match the source, which is 4K. Actually I want to untick that, and actually just make it HD, which is 1080. Click enter and it changes the width and the height because this is linked. So I've gone from UHD or 4K, down to HD. I didn't have to mess with my Premiere Pro file, just kind of do it all on the export. Now while we're here I'll throw a little bit of bonus extra stuff in, because the-- it started off at Maximum Bitrate, I lie, High Bitrate, and basically it's just to do with this part here. So the Bitrate setting is set to 10. What you might do is, just to get the best quality out of this, you can set it to a variable Bitrate, 2 pass. 

All it just means is, well, we lowered it down maybe to get it quite small. If you put it on this setting, Variable Bitrate, 2 pass, it's going to take longer, and what it will do is it will look through the footage, and the stuff that is moving fast, will use this higher Bitrate, 12, you can go higher than this. This would be a really typical kind of good quality video. You can crank it right up to a zillion, but 12 is good, and what it's going to do is going to say, when it's moving fast it's going to use 12, and when things are moving slowly we're going to lower it down to 10, because there's not much changing between the frames.

So the Bitrate doesn't need to kind of change in a depth so fast. You could lower this down to, I don't know, 8. You can play around with this depending on your video. The other one in here, just so you know, Constant Bitrate. You can just say, don't mess around with the variables, just stick it at 8, don't change it, whereas a Variable Bitrate will give it kind of a high low, but will take a lot longer to process. 

The other thing you might do is use maximum render quality, just to get the most out of this 4K footage being cut down to HD. Let's click 'OK', that should render it, and it should come out HD. Where am I going to stick it? I'll stick it on my Render Files. So we're going to 'Exercise Files', 'Project 3', renders, stick it on with that gang. Hit 'Play', and let it go through its time. That didn't take any time at all, and we've got our clouds. It's been cut down to HD footage, looks nice, nice and easy. That's it for this video, I will see you in the next one.