Tips & Tricks for Adobe Media Encoder

All right, we're back, we're fresh, we're ready to go, let's get into the tips and tricks for why Media Encoder is good. We'll look at the big ones first, and then we'll get into some of the more less known tips and tricks, to help you with your workflow. 

So the four big ones for Media Encoder is, I can grab a bunch of different sequences, and export them all at the same time, right click 'Export Media' or use our shortcut 'Command M', decide on your preferred output, let's queue them up. Media Encoder has got them all, ready to go, that brings us to reason number two, why it's so awesome. I can hit 'Play' and it will run through all of these, in order. I can go to bed, I can have hundreds of them in here, and I can go to sleep finally, and it'll plot its way through them all, excellent. 

Reason number three is, the sequence here, I can export to Media Encoder, and I can say, queue it up, and I can actually run not just one version, I'm going to use my Adaptive High but I can actually output, another couple of versions, one high, one low, maybe some other format, hit 'Play', and look, they'll run concurrently, fancy. I bet you, you're like, "Huh, you can do that?" "You've been duplicating them, right?" Copy paste, different versions, and that works, but oh, imagine if they could run concurrently, rather than at separate little steps, it's heaps faster, and a lot of time that's what we're doing, high, low res versions. 

All right, reason number four, and four is, while this thing is running I can be working still in Premiere Pro, it still works, I can be doing stuff in Premiere Pro, while Media Encoder does its busy work in the background. All right, so those are the four main reasons, let's jump into some of the more kind of useful tips for Media Encoder, that you may or may not know. 

The first tip is, I'm going to send lots of things to the Media Encoder, right click 'Export Media', send them all over, you can actually change them all in bulk while you're in Media Encoder, let's jump over there, here it comes. I do this most often with the output name, so drag a box around them all, we'll hit 'Command A' on a Mac, 'Ctrl A' on a PC, you can say, actually, I want you all to be, just click on one of them, and you can say, actually, I want to put them all in the Desktop, I'm going to go into my 'Socials' folder, click 'Choose', and they all change. 

Same with this, if you want to go through and say, actually, they all need to be something else, you know, all selected and all changed at once. With all these versions selected, we can do that thing again where we say add output, rather than add a new source or duplicating it, which is this one here, we want to say, add a new source, and they all get this other source, and I can say, you, you, I'm holding down the 'Command' key on my Mac, 'Ctrl' key on a PC, just to select the second ones here, and actually, I want to click on one of them. Actually, let's do the drop down here and say, I want one of them to be the low bitrate, so they're all going to have a medium and a low. 

Next tip is, do you know you can reorder them? You can say, actually, I want this one first, because that's the one I need to send to the client this morning, and oh, I dragged it down, this one, the multi one is the one, that's got, you know, needs to go to the client first. So you can drag them around, drag the order, you can do it while it's playing, look, it's busy throwing this, you’re like, actually no, this one needs to go next. 

Tip number, next one's, maybe three, you can pause them, you can say, actually, pause that because my machine's about to mount through the ground, and I need to do something in After Effects or Photoshop, and I can come back to it in a second, hit 'Play' again. Tip four, it might be working, you might be like, actually, can we just skip that high-res ones, I'm not sure why you would, but you can skip them, there you go, skip these guys, please, I don't know why, but you can-- let's pause it again. 

You can send Media Encoder, just bits, let's say you only need this intro here, in point, which is my I key on my keyboard, set my out point, it might be a really big intro, something a bit fancier than this, but if I hit my 'Command M', 'Ctrl M' on a PC, it will set just the in and out point, I can render just this, you can overwrite it in here to say, actually, just do the entire sequence, please, likewise you can do it the opposite way, you've got no in and out points, you've got this big project you're exporting, clear the in and outs.

I'm going to send it over, and actually, in here you can say, I just want, this section here that needs reviewing with a logo reveal. I can cue this one, and in here I can say, actually, let's duplicate it, different from the adding, a different kind of output, because in this one, I want to go in and actually do a different part. I want to maybe break it into sections, so I'm going to export just that part. 

Other weird thing you might have seen in there, Custom, so entire Sequence In/Out makes sense, what the hell's Work Area? Does anybody-- if you're old school you'll be like, I know Work Areas, remember that? Tiny bit of digression, but if you do want it back, it used to be along the top here forever, you can turn it back on, on your Timeline by going to here, Work Area. If you have no idea what the Work Area is for, it was a way that you could say, actually just, it's like an in and out point but it was just, it was back when computers were really, really slow dealing with video, and you could render just this little part here. Anyway, nobody uses anymore, you might love it but that's where it went. 

Last little tip is that when you are encoding-- let me get a few of these going, there's a ridiculous cue, but watch what happens, I'm going to make this smaller, they're smaller, so you can see it. Did you know that if I start rendering, and in Premiere Pro I start playing, watch it, actually, it's queuing up, oh, it's going pretty fast, slow, down. If I hit play over here, watch what happens over on this side. So I'm trying to play Premiere Pro, - "May the road rise to…" - You see what happened? Did you know that happened? I undo it, it starts going again, - Play again, it pauses. - "May the wind always be at your back." 

I'm going to pause that, pause, please. Why does that happen? It's so that it kind of gives Premiere Pro some resources, Media Encoder wants all of your system resources to do the encoding as fast as it can, that's its job. Premiere Pro wants all the resources to try and play back the video, so what it does by default is that it actually pauses your render, while you're playing back, which is not a big deal, unless it is a big deal for you, if it is, you can go and turn it off, it's in 'Media Encoder', I'm going to go to, remember, on a Mac it's under, sorry, remember, on a PC it's under 'Edit', and your 'Preferences' will be down there, on a Mac it's under 'Media Encoder', 'Preferences' and it's in here somewhere, somewhere here. 

It's not in here at all, it's in Premiere Pro, 'Premiere Pro', 'Preferences', 'Playback', I want to say playback, there it is there, pause Media Encoder during cueing up, the Media Encoder queue, during playback, you can turn that off if you want, but Premiere Pro will struggle to play, up to you. 

All right, so those are the kind of like, light and breezy tips and tricks for Media Encoder, I'm going to separate the kind of bigger ones into separate videos now, but hopefully there was something useful in those little fly through, but the one thing you might know or notice during this course, is that Media Encoder looks a lot like Premiere Pro, so especially in this kind of like export settings. 

So a lot of the features that we're going to cover in a second are kind of, you could get to via Premiere Pro, without ever opening or installing Media Encoder, actually, probably need it installed, but you don't have to send it to Media Encoder to get the benefits, it's just, I've put them in the Media Encoder section, because they make more sense when you're doing a lot of this repetitive stuff, which is what Media Encoder is really good for. All right, let's get on to those videos.