TMPGEnc encoding from Premiere with Video Server

There are some MPEG2 encoders which are "plug-ins" to Adobe Premiere. This means you can select them as an output format just like an AVI output. Other encoders, such as the excellent TMPGEnc encoder are not plug-ins, but you can still use them from Premiere. I describe how to do this as follows.

There is a program called Premiere Video Server Plugin from videotools.net. What the server plugin does is create a "virtual" AVI file, which you can open in TMPGEnc as if it were a regular AVI. In fact it is a link through the server plugin to Premiere, so you have both programs running at once: Premiere serving the video from the timeline, and TMPGEnc encoding it to the final MPEG2 format. It would probably be faster if TMPGEnc were a native Premiere plugin, but anyway this does work and there are no 2 GB AVI format filesize limits to deal with

It is not necessarily obvious what you have to do to get this working. Once you have installed the server plugin, you get a new export type in Premiere called "Video Server". Once you've got your finished project set on the timeline in Premiere, go to File/Export Timeline/Movie (or type control-M) and in the resulting Export Movie box click "Settings..." to get the Export Movie Settings box. In General settings, "File Type" pulldown menu you should see a new type called "Video Server". Select that, click on "advanced settings" and click OK on the scary CRC warning which apparently means nothing. Now you get the Premiere Video Server Settings Dialog. Actually you should not change anything here except possibly the export file name or timeout duration, but if you get here at least it means it's working. Click OK and OK and Save to export your file. A new window "Premiere Video Server Plugin" pops up showing Server Info and General info, and "Request Frame" showing you are at Audio frame 0 and Video frame 0. These numbers will start changing as soon as you start up TMPGEnc or other encoder, open the file C:\IPCServer.AVI (or whatever you entered in the Server Settings), and start encoding.

Remember that Premiere does not really save the file on the disk, it just passes it in real-time to TMPGEnc, so it has to be running the whole time that TMPGEnc is working. So don't quit out of Premiere or the Server box until TMPGEnc has finished encoding the file.

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