Premier Elements 3 & Audio Question?

[frappawotsit]

I see from the forum that it's advisable to demux the audio from the video stream so it can be compressed to AC3 before being re-muxed to the video sequence.....

HELP - I see the advantage, but have NO IDEA how to even begin! The following is my rough process:

My source file comes straight from DV Camcorder. Import from cam using windv, then edit in premier elements 3. When i open the .avi files in adobe prem, the audio is already matched to the video as it's all one file. I tinker about with it all, then render it to an mpeg which again contains both audio and video. As to which type of audio, i'm assumig .wav?

1) So how do i go about seperating the audio/video signals
2) How do i convert from .wav to .ac3
3) How do i get the audio back to the video and perfectly synchronised?

Can i do as current, ie do all my editing etc of both video and audio in adobe prem, then when i'm completely finished, instead of rendering to mpeg2, is that where i seperate the audio?

If done at this stage, would that mean that when i put the two files back together i don't need to worry about synching, because it should already be synched? Or because of the compression, does it need to be re-aligned with the video?

I guess that's the main part that scares me, is just how difficult it sounds to get the audio perfectly in sync with the video??????



thanks...

[gsh]

Elements 3 has a built in AC3 encoder, so it couldn't be simpler.
When rendering to mpeg2 select ac3 as the audio format. As long as your audio and video are in synch to begin with it should stay in synch.
(The ac3 encoder requires online activation)