What to Export?

When you have your edit completed and ready for delivery, there is only one step left – exporting for delivery. Exporting a finished video with Premiere Pro is an absolute essential skill that is required to finish any edit.

To export a video in Premiere Pro go to “File>Export>Media.” You could also press the shortcut key “control M” on PC, or “command M” on Mac. Make sure your sequence that you want to export is selected when you do this.

This will bring up your export settings window. In this window, you’ll select your desired settings or presets for the video before sending it to Media Encoder for exporting.

The first thing to think about when exporting a video is to think about where the video will be delivered and how it will be viewed. Are you going to upload to Youtube and Vimeo? Are you going to burn it to a DVD? Are you going to give the client a highly compressed rough copy to watch on their phone? The delivery destination is very important on deciding what the settings need to be. There are loads of useful presets already pre-installed with Premiere Pro and Media Encoder. You can use these presets to quickly choose settings for your exported file.

If you want to bypass these custom settings and export with the EXACT settings of your sequence, you can select “match sequence settings” at the top. That will change your export settings to exactly match your sequence settings, although I don’t recommend this because most delivery destinations require codecs other than your common editing or intermediate codec.

For this example, we’ll be exporting from Premiere Pro to upload to Vimeo. Note, these video export settings for Vimeo are applicable for other online video services as well, such as YouTube.

The best setting for web playback is the H.264 codec. So we’ll select our format as H.264.

We’ll select a preset that matches our sequence and our desired output. Our sequence is 1080p with a frame rate of 29.97. So, we’ll select the “HD 1080p 29.97″ preset.