I recently completed my first 5 minute project in Premiere Pro CS6 with great results. The source material is a Canon 7D, and I'm working with unconverted native files. Unfortunately, as the project had color-correction with Magic Bullet looks, filters like sharpening, and layers to "blur" certain elements on-screen, the initial compressed h264 export took nearly 7 hours.
A bit of research led me to realize I was better off exporting a "master" and converting outside of Premiere Pro. So, what would be the best way to proceed?
Should I render my timeline and then choose export with "match sequence settings" and "use previews"? Should I not pre-render and instead export only with "match sequence settings"? If I do pre-render and use previews, will the resulting quality be the same as if I render while exporting?
Or is there another way? Could I create preview files with ProRes and export to ProRes?
Thanks for helping out a thrilled PP convert.