Participant

Question

PPro export produces massive files or terrible quality

Forum|Forum|8 years ago
October 19, 2017
9 replies
4125 views

I know others have asked these questions online and I've read a lot of replies over a span of a few months but my issue has never been adequately resolved.

My company hosts webinars and we provide the recordings to guests. A 1.5 hour webinar, recorded by Zoom, produces a good quality mp4 file with clear visuals that is less than 200 megs at 1920 x 1080 with a 254 kbps total bitrate.

Often, I have to do a few edits and I use Premier Pro. I cannot get decent output from this program no matter what I try. If I output the file to try to match the original specs I get a 2 gb file, which is far too large to distribute to viewers. Also, it looks no better than the original which was 1/10th the size.

Any options I try to get the file size down at best get the file size below 1 gb, but the text on the presentation slides is no longer clearly readable and the aspect ratio is much smaller (e.g., 640 x 360). The bitrate is actually far higher despite the much lower quality.

Clearly I'm doing something wrong becauase it seems impossible that Zoom Webinar is far superior at creating smaller, clear video files than Premiere Pro. I've gone through all kinds of online tutorials on this with zero success. Also, if all I'm doing is clipping out a short portion (which is sometimes the case) why on earth must it re-encode the whole file to save it? Once, I just added a title slide and my video came out 10 times the size! Today's file just has some small sound edits and I removed a 3 second section. I cannot get a usable output file to save my life.

Help! What am I messing up here?

This topic has been closed for replies.

Jesbre99

Participant

Well it's 5 years later, and I thought I would pop in with something that helped me.

I am very novice with Premiere Pro - I was checking "Scale to Frame Size" for my Zoom video and I think this was doing terrible things to the quality.

I followed these instructions to make the Sequence automatically fit the specs of my Zoom video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1d5JOTMflIM

Jesbre99

Participant

(and now the quality is much better). I don't mind if the file size is large, I was just getting so frustrated as to why the quality was so bad and I couldn't figure it out! But this seems to have sorted it for me.

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Bill G Winter Park

Participant

I know it is years later, but I had this problem and came across this search today. Turns out there is an excellent video on how to do this, which I tried and adding titles to a 45 min Zoom recording in Premiere. I got a nice 250 MB file exported, after 1.5 GB on previous attempts. Here is the URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QHF6GHq8y5k

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adann

Inspiring

Check out this video: How To Compress / Downsize Video File Size Premiere Pro, Javier Mercedes

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Estarno1

Participating Frequently

I just made a quick tutorial about this issue! Link below, hope this helps you out.

https://youtu.be/5j8BmjBrAyc

K

kellyr32706311

Participant

t

C

CoolieB

Participant

Did you ever find a response to this. You would think that zoom would release a preset for export. I have tried everything. Clicking sofware rendering does help but file sizes are still bigg even with cuttin several minutes off the front and back end of the zoom recordings and quality goes down:(

Nood6

Participating Frequently

1) use 2 pass VBR, not 1 pass.

2) Check "Use Maximum Render Quality"

3) your bit rates are way to low for any decent 720p or 1080p footage. Find out the bit rate of the source footage and mimic that.

3) you're upscaling your audio. That's pointless as you can not get better quality from a lower quality source by using a higher export setting. This doesn't hurt your visual footage but it's increasing your output size unnecessarily

4) your target drive is also your OS drive (C:) . That's bad. You absolutely need to export to a different drive. Even attaching a cheap USB 3.0 external drive and export to that will yield better performance and minimize encoding errors.

HTH

M

Meg The Dog

Inspiring

Can you post a screen shot of the Export Settings Summary, like this example below:

MtD

TamraRLAuthor

Participant

Sure, this is the best setting I have found so far and it's actually usable, but still larger than I'd like and somewhat grainier (for context, my specific skillset is in computer programming and graphic design. I'm learning video and sound editing but clearly need to understand exporting a bit better!).

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Meg The Dog

Inspiring

I'm not sure I can help you with this as I don't work at such low bitrates. Maybe someone else can help.

Couple of things, though - in your first post you said the source file is 1920x1080, but you are editing on a 1280x720 timeline, is that your intent? This is forcing Premiere to resize each frame.

Also, have you tried using a Constant Bit Rate?

MtD

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excited_Genie16B8

Legend

For starters, don't use that webinar recording for editing. Pick up something like the HyperDeck Studio from Blackmagic Design to record the video signal before streaming it. Use that recording for editing.

TamraRLAuthor

Participant

Ok, good tip, but we are volunteer run and I'm not always the person who hosts and records. I am not able to control the software our various hosts will use, hence our usage of the built in tools for the webinar system.

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ericm77177865

Participant

everyone is in different locations.

That throws a major kink into your work flow.

Bottom line, you need to record the video before it's streamed. If you can't make that happen, then you may have to live with the quality compromises.

This type of response is not very useful, and it's gives the community its reputation for condescension. It also doesn't address the core software query. If the only response to solving a software problem is "Change your entire organizational structure," it's not a good response.

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