9/2/2006 3:15:13 PM

I just bought Adobe Premiere Elements 2.0 and I created my first video today.  I thought I exported the file to MPEG2 to my hard drive.  When I look for it there are two files.  One has an extention on the file that is .m2v   The other one has something even stranger which I can't remember right now. When I try to double click on the .m2v, Windows does not know what to do with it.  However I can play it with WinDVD.  Likewise, I can't see it when I use SSP.  What am I doing wrong?  What's the best  format I should be saving to?  I will only be showing it with SSP.
Thanks!
Bruce

9/3/2006 7:43:39 AM

Bruce,

Its no so much the format you are saving it too. But the codecs your projection computer has installed to use for playback. You have to have the same codec to use with playback as the one used to create it.

Try exporting the File as MPEG 1 for starters, or even AVI,

Rod

9/3/2006 2:51:00 PM

Rod,

Thanks for the suggestion.  Like I said I am new to this and I'm not sure what choices I should be making.  I'll try that and see what happens.  Thanks again.

Bruce

9/5/2006 8:26:45 AM

I use Premiere Pro which is different, but there is some parallelism with Elements so this might help: I capture a service using a Matrox capture setup which puts the video and audio in an avi container file. That raw avi file is imported into Premiere Pro and put on the timeline, edited, then Export > Matrox Realtime Export to Disk command (which is probably an add-on by Matrox, not a standard Premiere command).

Now, that export generates two files, the m2v file and a wav file. Note the m2v is an mpeg2 video intermediate file; it doesn't contain any audio. I import both the m2v and the wav files into Adobe Encore which combines them into the VOB files and writes to a DVD. This Encore functionality is probably also built into Elements (although I don't have Elements and can't be sure).

That explains a bit about the two files you are getting; they are often used for DVD's.

Premiere Pro also has an Export > Adobe Media Encoder command which writes a file to disk that SSP can read. That command has maybe 30 different preset formats, each with maybe 50 options. Using those I can write a file that ssp can process. I've used various WM9 and mpeg1 formats. I suspect Elements can do something similar but again, I don't know. Hopefully that is all you need to do; just as a separate step.

9/6/2006 12:10:38 AM

If you change the file extension to .mpg, Windows Media Player will probably then play the file (assuming that you have MPEG-2 codecs installed on your system) as will SSP.