Adobe Premiere - Newbie Questions

[gschilling]

I am just getting into the video editing arena, and have been playing around in Premiere. My questions are pretty basic, so please bear with me:

What is the best method for editing and exporting so that I can burn to DVD, from a file format and encoding point of view. I have an analog Camcorder that I connect to my Avermedia card. I capture in DVD format with Ulead Movie Factory. I edit in Premiere, then what do I do? Do I export to AVI with Premiere, then re-encode to MPEG2? Seems like a lot of disc space, 300MB for like 30 second AVI. I only have 40GB. Or do I use the Adobe MPEG Encoder to go right back to MPEG2? If so, what settings? I just want to avoid re-encoding if I don't have to. If someone could walk me through some settings for capture, edit, and export, I would be miles ahead of where I am now.

Thanks,
Gene

[housepig]

you will find that a lightly-compressed avi is a format much more suited to editing than mpeg-2.

I would capture in avi, with MJPEG codec at quality 18 or 19 (6-10Gb per hour).

do your edit, and render / export as a dvd-compliant mpeg-2. There should be a preset for it, if not, check the specs in the "What Is: DVDR" section at top left, and follow spec.

And yes, it will take a lot of space, but at least you will only have to render the mpeg-2 one time.

[Paul_W]

I think the answer to your question depends on what program that you are using to encode your DVD's. Adobe Premier 6.5 comes with a pretty good MPEG2 encoder so you have your choice of how to export and save your movie.... MPEG2 or AVI. DVDit that comes with Premier wants MPEG format files. Other DVD encoder programs prefer AVI's.

Hope that helps.

[dcsos]

Why not capture direct to PREMIERE?
Swing the MJPEG clip that HOUSEPIG suggests onto the timeline..

edit out the black at the beginning and end using the RAZOR BLADE icon in premiere to create a split in the time line then remove the stuff you don't wan't (RIGHT CLICK and CLEAR or DELETE)

then SAY FILE>ADOBE MPEG ENCODER>DVD COMPLIANT

this'll make the MPEG-2 files that go into DVDit (lousy program)
or try DVDLAB or TMPGAuthor
if you have bucks..ARCHITECT