Exporting your video from Ulead Mediastudio Pro 7


Essentially this part is very very easy, but there are some things here that people make mistakes on so it's worth going through what you need to do.

Firstly, your export settings should be identical to your project settings in every way but the codec. This means that in order to get the same looking amv out of your project that you saw in the preview window then you need to keep all the settings exactly the same. The only exception to this rule, as I have said is the codec.

Secondly, in this guide we are going to export the audio separately as well as part of the video file - this will give us easy access to the audio stream later on.

Also, this guide is geared towards compression with software codecs - if you are using the features of a hardware video editing card (such as a DV card) then you should consult the manual for that card. Of course, it should be equally possible to still use these settings but you will lose any realtime rendering benefits (and archiving benefits with DV).

Exporting the Video


Go to File menu > Create > Video File...

File> Create > Video File...

You will the see a box like this:

Export Dialog

Locate an appropriate folder and enter a name such as the one above.

Unless you are exporting for your DV, you should choose Microsoft AVI files (*.avi) in Save as Type.

Now click Options... to change the settings of the default template.

Video Editor Options

You will notice that many of the defaults have been deselected here. Let me go through each setting so you know why.

Entire Project vs Preview Range: I did not have a preview range selected when I made this screencap. This will decide how much of the project timeline is exported. Entire project means the whole thing and Preview range will only export the section you have selected.

Perform non-square pixel rendering: This should be deselected as we are editing everything with square pixels. We do not need the aspect ratio compensating for display on a monitor - we can tweak the aspect ratio after we export.

Play after creating: Unnecessary and may crash your program, so don't do it - test the file in media player or virtualdubmod instead.

Perform SmartRender: This is a bad idea for people editing in Video for Windows and using a preview codec like MJPEG. This will use your previews in your encode to save time but this is not what you want as it will reduce the quality of your video. You can keep this enabled if you are using a hardware DV solution.

Key frame control: You do not need to set any of these options as both Huffyuv and DV have every frame as a keyframe.

Cropping: We can do this later, so it is unimportant. For DV this is not a good idea as you need to keep the full screen resolution.

General Settings menu:

Export > General Options

Data Track: Audio and Video will export both into one avi file. This is fine although we don't need the audio here as we will also export it separately.

Frame Rate: This should be identical to you source. 23.976 if using FILM, 29.97 if using full NTSC and 25fps if using PAL.

Frame Size: The standard frame rate is fine unless your project has a different one, in which case you should use the User Defined options.

AVI Settings Menu:

Export - AVI Settings

Compression: This is the important part. There are only 2 things you could ever want to choose here - HuffYUV (included in the AMVapp) or Uncompressed (unless you are using the native options of a hardware card). Occasionally I get errors with my HuffYUV files which result in what I call 'dirty frames'. This could be just my system but whenever this happens I resort to using uncompressed RGB. It's big as hell but it works.

HuffYUV actually has 2 modes of compression - YUV and RGB. You should always export RGB as it is the native editing colourspace of the program - this ensures that everything will look as it is supposed to.

To make sure that HuffYUV compresses the footage in RGB mode, and to set up other options, choose 'Configure' next to the compressor.

Exporting Huffyuv

In RGB compression method you should always have Predict Gradient (best) selected. This will make sure that when Ulead sends the codec RGB footage that it is compressed as RGB and not as YUY2.

The other options in the Huffyuv settings are not actually important when exporting from Ulead. Enable RGBA compression is useful if you have used Alpha Channels but this is mostly a feature you would need more for Adobe After Effects. Enabling this option in Ulead would just give you needlessly bigger files.

Data Type: You should choose 24-bit RGB when converting to huffyuv.

Audio: Format - Should be PCM

Audio: Attributes - This should be identical to your source wav. For a CD rip this is 44.100 kHz 16bit stereo. For DVD ripped audio it may be 48kHz. Check your source wav to be 100% sure.

Once you have all those set, let's look at the last menu that you can access by clicking the Advanced...button.

Export - Advanced AVI settings

Data Rate will not be needed in your encode but Recompress will and should always be selected.

Interleave audio and video should be selected if exporting the audio at this point and set to 1 frames.

Pad frames for CD-ROM is totally unnecessary for this kind of export. This is used to keep a fixed bitrate for easier decoding from cd-rom.

You should now be good to go. Click ok until you are back to the save file box, check your filename is correct and export that video.

Be warned, these files are big. If you are using Windows 2000 or XP make sure that you export to a hard drive that uses the NTFS file system otherwise long amvs might exceed the 2 gig file limit on old FAT32 drives. If you are running windows 98 then you are going to be limited to 2 gig - if you can't export the whole movie for this reason then you will have to select a frame range and export it in two or more sections. You can join these later in AVIsynth as follows:

AVIsource("C:/part1.avi") + AVIsource("C:/part2.avi") + AVIsource("C:/part3.avi")


Hopefully this wont be necessary and you can export the whole thing. Make sure you have enough space on your drive - you'll need around 2 to 4 gig for a video.

Once you've exported your video, you can export your audio stream separately for easy access.

Exporting the Audio as a Wav file.

Again, go to File > Create... but this time choose Audio File

You will see a box like this:

AVI Settings - Advanced

This time, however, Save as type should be Microsoft WAV Files (*.wav)

Now click Options...

Audio Options

Pretty simple stuff - the range setting should be exactly the same as the video you exported.

Audio Compression

Format: PCM (Uncompressed)

Attributes - This should be identical to your source wav. For a CD rip this is 44.100 kHz 16bit stereo. For DVD ripped audio it may be 48kHz. Check your source wav to be 100% sure.

Click OK to return to the save box and save that audio stream.

You now have master video and audio files exported ready to be made into distribution copies.