DVD issues.
 

can anyone walk through the best way of getting a timeline to best qualtiy DVD on premiere. on my time line is a feature length movie. what i did was i went through the original time line, i added widescreen bars too it, along with various color correction type things, ie. gamma correction, brightness/contrast, messing with saturation, and film grain. instead of making a dvd from that processed timeline with all the effects there, i exported it to microsoft dv avi, then i made the dvd from that. is there a difference in quality between quicktime vs. microsoft avi. im really not happy with the quality of my dvd. should i just go to a post house or something? please let me know what you guys think. peace

i don't know of any need or any advantage to using quicktime with pc editing systems.

have you closely examined the mpeg encoding settings used by premiere(aka mainconcept encoder), when you created the dvd?

What program did you use to encode the AVI to DVD (i.e., MPEG-2)? What were the settings used?

dvd/premiere pro 1.5 issues
 

i went straight from the timeline to dvd. basically, i "exported to dvd." i think the problem is that it got compressed during the writing part. let me know what you think. it's just that the outcome dvd doesn't look the same as when im just watching it through the timeline. let me know what you guys think. peace

Now you've got me confused, as in your first post you said this:

So which way did you do it? Did you export to MPEG-2 directly from the time line, or did you make the AVI and then compress the AVI to MPEG-2?

Encoding directly to MPEG-2 from the time line would give you the best quality. Bear in mind that whether you go to MPEG-2 from the time line or from an AVI of the time line, the quality is definitely not going to be as good as what you see on a TV monitor when you play back the time line. MPEG-2 is much more compressed than the DV AVI files.

Jeremy,

My preference is to render my timeline to DV master, then MPEG compress, then author (add menus, chapters, and such). By maintaining a DV master, you are in much better shape for any subsequent re-editing. By using a good (not necessarily expensive) MPEG encoder, you have the flexibility to achieve the highest quality at the lowest data rate. There are MANY options available in better MPEG encoders - CQ (constant quality), fixed, or variable data rates, single or multi-pass encoding, and on and on. MPEG encoding ranges from the sublime to pure crap, and there is definitely a learning curve if you want to do it well.

In the special case of widescreen material, it is possible to use all 720 x 480 pixels as an anamorphic image (squished horizontally). The DVD player then letterboxes or stretches, depending on whether you have a 4 x 3, or 16 x 9 monitor. Of course, your MPEG encoder must allow you to tell it what shape the image is (regardless of pixel ratio). This is the way commercial DVDs are made, and allows the best picture regardless of screen shape.

In short, learning the ins and outs of MPEG compression will give you better pictures with smaller files. Just reading my little blurb is a start. Good luck!