What is the best export type from Premiere, for DVD?

[Alex Luette]

Can anyone help, please?
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?

[dcsos]

Always prepare the files in the editing application
Transcoding is not something you want to do at the authoring stage is you can help it
Encore is such a buggy program that unless you are editing on a new computer for ENCORE, you may find that it won't even transcode simple PREMIERE OUTPUT without errors!

[Alex Luette]

Many thanks for the help.
Yeah, buggy or WHAT! Encore is driving me nuts!

[dcsos]

Have you downloaded the .01 upgrade..some say it helps?

[daamon]

Hi Alex Luette,

What do people consider the best possible route for quality, never mind file sizes for now

All of the above and, in my opinion:

1. Do all your editing, effects etc. in Adobe Premiere, then export as AVI (or DV AVI if from a DV source). Editing MPEGs, whilst possible with the right tools, is prone to problems - the main one I've seen reported is audio out of sync.

AVI, by its nature, lends itself much more to editing. MPEG2 is more of an "end product" format.

2. Encode to MPEG2 using a decent encoder:

TMPGEnc
Mainconcept Mpeg Encoder
Canopus Procoder
Cinema Craft Encoder
...there's others but these seem to be the favourties.

I use TMPGEnc, and this guide to help me with the settings. Remember to rate the guide when you're done.

3. Author with something like:

TMPGEnc DVD Author
DVDLab
Sonic ReelDVD
...there's others but these seem to be some of the favourties.

Hope that helps. Good luck...

[dcsos]

Great discussion on your personal workflkow
Daaman but you must've mis read his post

He isn't editing MPEG2
He isn't looking for a new ENCODER

why the encoder he's using now is among your reccomendations already!!!

MPEG2 is more of an "end product" format...
Encode to MPEG2 using a decent encoder...Mainconcept Mpeg Encoder

We agree and If you read the above, we're already using MAINCONCEPT

the question was the one in PREM PRO or the one in ENCORE.. I say PREM PRO cause its customary to out put the finished clip.

If you want to change the clips later..OK I'm with you on AVI output here.

[daamon]

Daaman but you must've mis read his post

I have to confess, more of a case of not knowing the full functionality of Encore...

I suppose my only useful input is to not use Encore coz it's buggy, and so go for a tool that's decicated to each step. But I have learnt something new...

Right now, I'm more concerned about France leading England 21-3 in the Rugby... I wonder if me drinking more beer will help? Bye...

EDIT: Drinking more beer didn't affect the result. Probably the same for all sports around the world. I was hoping that a secondary affect would be to lessen the pain of losing. But more beer has only increased my depression. There's probably a lesson in there, but I doubt if mankind will ever learn it...

[Alex Luette]

Thanks, guys. Glad I sparked a bit of lively debate here!
Actually I'm facing a new problem, maybe you can turn your collective attention to this one?! I decided to go with MPEG2, since as you rightly realised I'm not editing it at all, only using it to prepare a DVD product, and as I trust Premiere a lot more than I do Encore I'll let it do the heavu rendering work. But my latest Encore bug is that after hours of preparation it's now refusing to build the final DVD because it calims that at a certain point on the timeline the bitrate is "too high for DVD". That's B------ because I've tested burning the same m2v/mpa files as a DVD with perfect results using other software. Any thoughts?

[daamon]

Hi Alex Luette,

I would say, given your comments and your agreement with others, that you're leading yourself to the conclusion that you don't wanna be using Encore...

Hence, my statement of my process above... Even though I don't know Encore, it's based on using the best(ish) tool for each step.

[dcsos]

I'm told that there are "SPIKES" in the Main concept output that can cause
ENCORE to throw a "BITRATE TOO HIGH" false message up!

Im told to upgrade the encoder with premiere pro (it ships with 1.0)
to 1.2 (free on website)

Looks like you should gone with the workflow that's contrary to "BEST PLANNING" because if ENCORE was doing the encodeing it wouldn't error at this stage (hopefully)