MPEG2 or AVI best for Encore?

[Alex Luette]

I'm working on a 73-minute video with Premiere and Encore. What do people consider the best possible route for quality, never mind file sizes for now: Export from Premiere as AVI, work with that AVI in Encore and then let Encore transcode to MPEG2 at the end? Or export from Premiere as MPEG2 in the first place and work with the .mpa and .m2v files in Encore, therefore no need to transcode?
And if the answer is to export AVI, what do people consider the better quality, DVAVI or AVI?

[petar]

If you want best quality always use an application for what it was primarily designed. If it's an authoring application use it for authoring, if it's an encoding application use it to encode, etc. I'm sure one can find couple of exceptions but this is the general rule.

Though some authoring programs can encode and edit I woudn't use them for that unless is something where quality isn't too important, like a menu, but not to encode the whole video.

[Sugar]

Both Premiere and Encore encode with the Mainconcept encoder so you will not see any difference in quality there. The diffrence will come from which encoder you use and the settings you use (CBR, VBR, #kbps...).

Regarding avi vs dvavi, this is a question of codec and level of compression. For all my videos shot from my camcorder, I stick to dvavi. I edit in Premiere, encode with TMPGEnc and author with Encore. No complaint so far quality wise.

[Alex Luette]

Many thanks to both of you for yourt help. I guess my only remaining wonder is this; is there a noticable quality difference between saving a Premiere timeline as DVAVI and then transcoding that to MPEG2, in, say, Encore (therefor to use old-world language 2nd generation copy). Or Encoding direct to MPEG2 from Premiere (first generation copy)?

[Sugar]

Check which version on the Mainconcept encoder you have in each software and use the latest one.