As far as I'm aware there's no way of directly from within Adobe Premiere determine the best size and bitrate for the material produced. As it is you will have to decide before saving your material what bitrate you want to use. There has always been the option of saving it to disk first and then compressing it using an external application, but that also means more time for rendering, saving to disk and so on.

As I learned a few days ago there is a method which allows directly serving material from Adobe Premiere (and Vegas Video) to an application such as Gordian Knot. This immediately opens up some new possibilities. Such as compressibility tests, resolution altering and size prediction for example. Another easy-to-use feature of the MPEG-4 codecs is a 2-pass encode, which is now made very easy straight out of Adobe Premiere. Well, almost straight out anyway.

So how does it work? Nothing fancy really. You create your movie using Premiere just like you would normally do, and it isn't until it's time to export that we'll use the option of serving the movie to Gordian Knot.

But before we do anything we should install the PluginPac plugin. Download it from the developer's site linked at the top of this document and install the plugin to its own folder called "pluginpac" in the Premiere plugins directory. You will also have to make sure that Gordian Knot and its associated applications are installed. If you are unfamiliar with Gordian Knot, you can check out the guide I wrote explaining how to use it. The main guide is here and the Gordian Knot section is here.

Well now, Gordian Knot and the Premiere plugin is now installed so let's move on to the actual content.

When you're happy with your Adobe Premiere movie and wish to save it as an AVI, go into Export --> Movie and then under "Settings" you should change the file type (from for example Microsoft AVI) to "PluginPac FrameServer" and then save the movie as a file with the .avi extension. Call it my.avi for example, and click OK. A small window will pop up indicating that the frameserver is ready to go. Don't close Premiere or the project. Now open up Gordian Knot and open up the file you just saved (my.avi). Adjust your settings and then simply start your encoding run. You will now notice, if you switch back to Premiere that the plugin is serving the material to Gordian Knot. When the encoding is finished you can close both Gordian Knot and Adobe Premiere.

NOTE! If you are using TGA files created by for example Quake3 for your movie, you need to convert the color space to YV12 before sending the content to the encoder. Check the Gordian Knot section for more info.