Troubleshooting: Your video takes a long time to download and play - Premiere Pro Tutorial

- If you are saving your video for the internet or even an intranet delivery, and the video is taking a while to play, the reason is usually because the file size is too large for the server to serve it to the customers properly. You need to make the file size smaller, or you need to make the bit rate smaller, or in many cases, both. You will need to experiment with different settings, as they are content-dependent and will look good on some videos and not so good in others. Let's go ahead and open the sequence, named 4.2 Long Time. So, Sequences, Chapter Four, and of course, 4.2 Long Time. And in here, we see the clip that we're going to export. Let's go ahead and export, Control + M for Windows, Command + M on the Mac. And in here, you can change the format to an H.264, and you should get an estimated file size in here. Now, let's find out what the original file size was. So, if you click on Cancel, right-click the clip in the sequence, and choose Reveal in Project, in the Project panel, you will be able to right-click, go to Properties, and you will be able to clearly see the original file size, which is 60.09 megabytes. So, let's go ahead and close this, select a timeline again, and export again. H.264, and 12 megabytes, right? So, considerably smaller. Notice what happens when we change the bit rate. If we make this a higher number, this estimated file size goes higher and higher and higher. Now, if you want to make the video better, I wouldn't necessarily go to something bigger than what it was, right? I would add the Unsharp Mask Effect, increase the contrast, that sort of thing, rather than increasing the bit rate to make the file size larger, because you have the information that you have, and doing this will not make the clip any better. Now, let's go ahead and change things like frame rate and frame size. If I want to change the frame size, I'm going to make these linked so there's a relationship between width and height, I can make this frame size smaller. Notice that it's not changing my file size too much, at all in fact. Let's go ahead and change the frame rate as well. Let's do maybe a 15. Do you see how the file size remains the same? Let's go ahead and change the format to Windows Media. And in here we can also change the bit rate. We can change it to a lower average and a lower peak. And you're going to see that you can have VBR, or variable bit rate, or constant bit rate. And, of course, this depends on how we want to encode this. In this particular clip, I'm just going to leave it at constant, and I'm going to change the bit rate. Notice that as I change the bit rate, the file size is changing as well. For example, if I want to go to something a little bit higher, look at the average bit rate, it's going up, so is the file size. Let's go ahead and change this to a QuickTime file. And maybe we want to use Apple ProRes 422 HQ. And that's what was selected, so that's fine. And let's go ahead and render this. So, the output name, I'm just going to add ProRes 422 HQ at the end of it. So I'm going to click on this, choose my Desktop, and at the end I'm just going to add ProRes, so P-R, 422 HQ, and I'll click on Save, and now I'll click on Export. And there you go. Let's go ahead and export this again. I'm going to change the frame size by making this considerably smaller, and I'm going to change the name to the same Long Time, but this time, I'm going to put Smaller Frame Size. Let's save it and let's export it. Now, let's go directly to the Desktop, and let's compare these two. If I go to the Properties, see this one is 271 megabytes. This one is 115 megabytes, so the file size got affected by the frame size considerably. Let's go back into Premiere and export this again. Let's go ahead and change the format to a DNX. In here, let's export it with the DNX HQ 1080p. I'm just going to add that to the end, and of course we're going directly to the Desktop, and this is DNxHQ, click on Save, Export, and let's export this again. Same, DNX HQ, but this time, let's reduce the frame rate to 23976. So, slower frame rate, click on Save, click on Export, and now once it's done, let's go to the Desktop and let's compare the file sizes. Right-click this one, Properties, and look at the name, DNxHQ, so this is the one that had the 2997 frame rate. Look at the size, 269. So, 269, click OK, let's right-click the other one, Properties, and this is the slower frame rate one, and it's 215. So, as you can see, the frame rate also affected the file size on this one. How to make the file size smaller changes depending on the codec you are using. For some codecs, the bit rate is all that matters. For others, you could change quality, frame rate, and/or frame size, and it will make a difference.