I use FCP at home, but I am teaching a multimedia design at the local community college, which only has Premiere 6.5 (on Mac OS X G5s). I have tried exporting from Premiere 6.5 with similar QuickTime settings to those that I use with FCP, but I am not happy with the results. I have bought two Premiere 6.5 books, but neither of them has been very useful in helping me to solve this problem.

I need to teach my students how to export Internet-ready QuickTime movies (to be embedded in web sites) no larger than 400x300 pixels, with good image quality (better that YouTube). Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Might not be possible in stock Premiere 6.5 because the export options are more limited. YouTube uses On2_VP6 compression in an FLV wrapper, and I personally think it is one of the best internet encoding options available. Everyone claims H264 is better, but I have yet to be as impressed. Kind of a moot point in your case, because Premiere 6.5 supported neither. Your best bet is probably with Quicktime since I assume you have a recent verson, and Premiere may be able to take advantage of new codecs that were developed long after the software was released. I recommend exporting in DV and using the standalone FLV encoder if this is at all an option available to you.

I don't have a lot of options available to me since I'm limited to what the community college has installed; I tried to convince them at least to invest in QuickTime Pro so the students could export in DV from Premiere and then use QT Pro to do the compression — but no, the budget won't stretch that far.

I've done enough research to know that I can export using the QuickTime options in Premiere -- which gives me just about the same list of options as I have on my home computer in Final Cut Pro or QT Pro. What I can't figure out is why I can have nearly the same settings in FCP or QT Pro on my home computer as I do in Premiere on the community college computer -- and I get great quality from FCP or QT Pro on my home computer, but the Premiere file is full of problems like text with jagged edges and major interlacing jaggies (despite the fact that I checked "deinterlace source video" in the export dialog box).

I'm going to keep researching and trying options to see if I can find something that works, but I'm also open to suggestions!

Okay, I have found a way to export video so that I'm pleased with the image quality: I choose "QuickTime" (rather than "QuickTime File Exporter"), then choose either an MPEG or Sorenson3 compressor, and leave the quality at 100 percent. I also turn on "Better Resize" and "Deinterlace."

The only part of the video I'm not happy with are the titles that I have overlaid on the video (using the Title Designer). The text has jagged edges; in other words, it looks bitmapped. I have tried different fonts; I even tried removing the drop shadow under the text. Nothing seems to work.

I did read a thread ( http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?t=94636 ) about this problem, so I checked the field dominance; it is set to the lower field. The title is on the V2 track.

Any ideas or suggestions to fix the bitmapped-title problem?

Turns out the problem was with the G4 that serves as the instructor's computer in the classroom at the community college; it wasn't capable of showing me the video at best quality. When I view the video on one of the student computers (they have G5s; the instructor gets the short end of the stick!), it looks great!

I often think the quicktime's that Premiere exports (and I'm working on Premiere Pro) look like sh*t.
I use Quicktime Pro now, much better...

Also, if you open a AVI file, exported from Premiere (which always says 'Microsoft DV AVI') it always looks like crap in Quicktime...
Is this because of differences between codecs, or Quicktime handling the AVI format, which is in essence, a Windows Media Format (if I'm correct) ?