I have a 2 hour video edited in premiere and now I want to export it so I can bring it into Adobe Encore to make a menu. However everytime I export the movie, the video turns out to be 22 gigs when I compress it with the standard DV (NTSC) (avi). So at this point I know I need to compress it more but which codec is good so I wont lose a lot of quality. The finial video can only be alittle over 4 gigs, If I want to fit it on 1 dvd. Or will encore compensate for that much video. Thanks guys.

MPEG-2. That is the correct format for DVD. AVI is uncompressed video, which is why it is so large.

As a side note, AVI is only uncompressed when you choose uncompressed or
no codec. Otherwise it uses the compression codec you chose. Like DV, which
is a 5:1 DCT based lossy compression codec.

Nathan is right that the correct codec for a DVD export is MPEG-2. Use that
with one of the DVD templates. However, Encore should be able to re-encode
that DV AVI file to MPEG-2 for you as well (and fit it to disc).

Wow, I can't believe I didn't think about exporting to mpeg2. Anyway yeah Encore would probably recovert the avi to mpeg, well it wold have to. Thanks guys...should have used some common sense.

As opposed to exporting it from Premiere in MPEG-2, you could always render/export to uncompressed, huffyuv, or dv.avi (if you have the hard drive space), and then let Encore automatically transcode. For long flicks, it will by default encode to fill the disc to the brink.

-Steve

So in other words if my final video is 22 gigs encore would compensate while it transcoded? I guess that makes sense.

Nathan, please be aware a 2 hour video which is 22 gig as an avi has to be crunched down with a lower bit rate than would be for a 1 hour video using MPEG2, as a result the quality of the final video may be less than you are expecting.

You may consider cutting your project in two and have it spread across two disks for better quality viewing, for instance 1 hour encoded at the highest bit rate using fixed isntead of variable encoding will fit nicely on a 1 hour disk.

Regards, Cliff Elliott

You could also try those new Dual Layer DVD's so that you can have really high quality and still use only one DVD.
I personally haven't tried the DL DVD's but we bought a 3 pack a couple of weeks ago but haven't had a project that would require it yet.
Oh, I forgot to mention the price, I think we paid almost $9 each for the DL DVD's.

Thanks Manny, yeah I was thinking about the DL dvd's also...and I probably will pick one of those up.

Another problem, when I convert to mpeg2 (which I might not end up doing) premeire freezes on this certain frame (11647) and its so annoying. So I converted to mpeg1 to see if it would do it there and it didn't, its wierd.

I use final cut pro and DVD Studio pro. I have a Bat Mitzvah that is 3 hours 17 minutes long. I have a dual layer and want to keep it together to cut down the work load of putting it on two disks. Any idea of the best bit rate? I think I need to keep it to about 7 - 7.5 gigs to make room for the menus (10 pages worth!).

Kinda makes you long for those days, when you just recorded it to VHS...

OK, can someone please tell me how to do this.
I just migrated to P.Pro, and if you want to render, you should save it as .avi. Then import it in Encore, after finishing with the project in encore, you then render it in mpeg-2 ...Is this correct?.

Or do you just render in mpeg-2 in PPro and also use mpeg-2 in Encore

Not sure how this applies in the P.Pro world, but I've always had better results and shorter renders when I use Vegas to render prior to bringing into DVD-A3. I've tried it both ways and DVD-A3 is slightly longer encode. Also I have more control over the render options than in DVD-A3. For what it's worth.