1080i to Standard DVD

[noisymonk]

Hi.
This is my first post here - sorry if this is in the wrong forum. I did do a quick search, although I'm in a bit of a hurry and didn't really have time to explore for these answers which I'm sure have been asked before. Condemn me to hell after you help me.

I've done a bit of video work in the past, but not much - and a long time ago so I'm pretty rusty, my questions are fairly simple.

Few details:
-AVS Video Converter
-Premiere Pro CS3
-Encore CS3

I need to edit some 1080i, 29.97fps, MPEG4 video, and burn it to a stardard DVD. My measly dual-core can't handle editing the raw 1080i video in Premiere - so I'm currently using AVS Video Converter to convert/compress the 1080i video into "DVD NTSC compatible - (MPG2, 4000 kbps, 720x480, 29.97 fps)"

Does this sound right so far? This conversion is going to take several hours, so if this is wrong, please stop me now.

Once this is done, I'd like to import the new videos into Premiere and start chopping them up.

But I'm not sure about what startup settings to use in Premiere? What about Export settings aswell? I want to make sure that the video won't get recompress once I export to Encore - I just want to chop up the video and export it without any additional compression.

Thanks for you help in advance, I appreciate it!
Noisymonk.

[Baldrick]

I would convert the 1080i mpeg4 to a less compressed format like dv-avi or huffyuv, lagarith and it's also better for editing.

[noisymonk]

Interesting stuff. I assume that I wouldn't be able to use those with AVS, but rather through Premiere?

This isn't a high quality video, just some home movies - so I'm not terribly concerned with perfect quality. I've checked out some of the compressed videos with my settings from above and they seem to be fairly decent.

I'll definitely check those out for other projects though, thanks.

Any thoughts on the Premiere settings?

[jagabo]

If you plan on any extensive editing you should consider DV AVI.

[aedipuss]

if you have AVS Video Converter why not do the editing in it and then convert to the "DVD NTSC compatible - (MPG2, 4000 kbps, 720x480, 29.97 fps)" format. then you just need to author the resulting mpeg-2s to dvd.

the fewer re-encodes the better.