How do I export without re-encoding? [PrEl 11]

[MichelleCox]

I've been searching and having no luck finding an answer to this. Maybe I'm just not finding the right terms. Or maybe I'm missing something obvious. LOL! At any rate, hopefully someone can help me out.

I go through my original video files and cut out the bad bits and save individual short clips from that which I then use to build the movies. Years ago, I would use VirtualDub for this because it was fast and easy. But getting it to work with modern DSLR files is more hassle than I feel like doing. So I've been using PrEl for this initial step as well. The problem is, I can't see any way to just export the trimmed clips without re-encoding them. It's not a huge deal as the extra re-encode doesn't seem to cause any visible degredation. Still, though, it would be faster and cleaner to simply export the trimmed clips as is without the re-encoding like I did with VirtualDub. Only I can't figure out how to get PrEl to do so. Anyone know?

Thanks,

Michelle

*Waves at the oldies that were on here when I was back when PrEl first came out*

[MichelleCox · Accepted solution]

Because this thread has meandered, I'm going to sum up the answer for anyone in the future who may search on this.

• Premiere Elements can't do the "smart edit" with this codec, though, according to Steve, it can with some like DV-AVI.
• Premiere Elements can do an uncompressed save, which is an option, though the tradeoff is uncompressed video is quite large. See this post: http://forums.adobe.com/message/3791571#3791571
• There are other programs out there that are capable of doing a "smart edit" with h264. Some are mentioned in the thread but I'm not going to list them in the summary because I'm not sure how ok it is to link to other software from this forum. If this is important to you, Google will turn them up.

Hope that helps future searchers.