DV Info Net - Premiere and Encore CS3 Encoding Problem

In the past few weeks I have been using Premiere and Encore CS3 to produce short movies in multiple formats. Previously I had been using Premiere Pro 2.0 and DVDLab Pro to produce SD DVD's only.

I am most impressed with the ability of Premiere and Encore to produce Blu-ray, DVD, and Flash output from a single project edited and authored in HD. Also, I find that the SD DVD quality is very satisfactory when working this way, taking into account the slight difference in sharpness of a 16:9 DVD compared with a 4:3 DVD with the same 720 x 480 pixels.

However, I have found a few episodes where red flashes appear in the files exported from Premiere and imported into Encore, and therefore appear in everything built from these files. These red flashes consist of a few consecutive pixelated frames, almost entirely red. They are MOST DISCONCERTING to the viewer, much more so than a simple freeze of the last good frame would be.

These red flashes are not numerous, perhaps two or three every 10 minutes, but this is numerous enough to be a big problem.

They seem to be more frequent at cuts, but they may appear in mid-scene also.

I have experimented a bit with two clips each a few seconds long. When put together on the Premiere timeline and exported to Encore there was a flash just after the cut. Removing frames to the right of the cut and re-exporting did not eliminate the flash; in one case the flash became green and in one case there was a second flash in the middle of the right-hand scene, where there had been no problem previously. Removing a single frame from the left of the cut made the movie play fine, with no flash, but the flash was there between the same two cuts in a longer movie when a couple of seconds had been trimmed from the left-hand clip.

The problem has appeared on two separate computers.

These two programs are next to useless unless this problem can be corrected or a reliable workaround found. Perhaps others have experienced it and can share the conditions under which it occurred and what they did to solve it.

Thanks,

Dick V.