Quicktime and Adobe Media Encoder
 

Our music composer has a mac-based studio, so he needs all of our cips sent to him in Quicktime. We purchased and downloaded Quicktime Pro 7 for Windows (assuming this would be a 5 minute ordeal). Once it was installed, I opened one of our edits in Premiere (1.5), and made a few custom export settings in Adobe Media Encoder, using different sizes, bitrates, and codecs - specifically, Sorensen and the new H.264. I was really excited about H.264 because of its advertised smaller file sizes, since we'll be sending all this video to him over a cable modem.

Anyway, to make a long story short - Media Encoder royally screws up all the quicktime encoding we tried. It gets way higher bitrates on Sorensen, and won't even encode the H.264. The encoding option menus are completely different from the ones in the QT-player app.

Apple won't support it yet, because it's technically a "pre-release"; however, they say I have to use 6.5.2, but I'll have to buy ANOTHER license (which I think is asinine). Adobe techs don't have a clue because they haven't "tested it yet".

Has anyone else been using Quicktime with Adobe Media Encoder with any level of success? Cineform guys, have you done anything special to get AME to work with QT?

Thanks in advance.

I encoded to H.264 with no problems from within Adobe Media Encoder after installing the QuickTime 7 preview release (didn't need to purchase the Pro version). If and when you do get it working make sure you use the deinterlace filter (if you have interlaced footage) for the best quality. Otherwise my videos looked terrible.

One thing I have found is that for some reason the bitrate slider in Adobe Media Encoder is totally inaccurate when encoding to QuickTime files. If my memory servers me correctly I believe it has to be set to around 25 Kb/s to get an approximately 350 Kb/s file.

You don't have to purchase the Pro version of QuickTime to get access to the MPEG-4 codecs from within Premiere Pro.

EDIT: Some thoughts: Have you installed the latest Premiere Pro update (version 1.5.1) (I would assume so since you're posting in the HDV section, but I just want to make sure)? Also, there is an Adobe Media Encoder update as well. Supposedly it's only for the MainConcept MPEG encoder, but who knows? Perhaphs it might have some other bugfixes as well. You can get it at http://www.mainconcept.com/adobemedia/downloads.html

It's the strangest thing. All software and drivers are up-to-date, including the media encoder 1.1 update, which, as you mentioned, is strictly for the MainConcept encoder.

So, the bitrate slider doesn't work right for you either...in that case, the Sorensen encoder works "correctly" on my system as well. But have you ever had blank/black video output for H.264? That's what mine does.

I can reencode Sorensen video TO H.264, but only from the QTPlayer app, so after the second generation of encoding, it looks crappier than it should.

Is there a safe way (besides uninstall) to wipe out all traces of quicktime from a system? I have a feeling that maybe there's some bad library or data file that's not getting removed or something like that.

No, like I said it worked fine for me (aside from the interlace issue).
That's a good idea to try a reinstall. If you are concerned about removing all traces of the application you could try a System Restore (just hope you have a restore point before the date/time you installed QuickTime 7).