A few weeks ago I wrote a guide on how to export in 720p from Sony Vegas, so here’s a guide for Premiere. The exporting is similar for Premiere Pro, CS2/3 and After Effects too. First, make sure your project’s properties is correctly set to HDV or HD with the right frame rate and aspect ratio, and then edit as usual.

After you edited your footage, click “Export”, “Adobe Media Encoder”. If you are using a non-Elements application (e.g. Pro, CS2/CS3, AEffects) use this guide instead, a method donated by Vimeo user Myksto. Modify the exporting option for the frame rate to reflect your source footage (e.g. if you are on 25fps PAL on 29.97fps NTSC or 23.976 for 24p).

If you are using Elements 4, click on “Share” and select the “Personal Computer” option on Elements and then “Quicktime”, then click “Advanced” and customize the exporting dialogs like this for .mov h.264 on Elements (recommended method), or like this for WMV (unfortunately, the WMV exporting dialog on Elements does not have an option for progressive/de-interlacing though). The only change you might need to do is to select either PAL’s 25 fps instead of the suggested NTSC’s 29.97, or 23.976 if you shot in 24p mode. If you shot in default mode with an NTSC camera, leave the frame rate unchanged.

That’s it, now sit back while your video is encoding and after a while you will be having a progressive 720p file for usage with Vimeo, or XboX360 (h.264/wmv), and the AppleTV (h.264) or the PS3. If you used Elements, the PS3 won’t playback the h.264 file (MP4 container incompatibility), but only the WMV one. If you used Pro/CS3/CS2/AEffects, it will play both the h.264 and the WMV because the professional versions of Adobe allow you to choose a different MP4 mode.