hello everyone,
Me and my partner (a music composer) are thinking to make our movies (short films) with Dolby Digital. After some reading/researching, we found the requirements to use the Dolby Digital Trailers in our movie (from Dolby Digital website). one of them was:

"The video program must be encoded using a high-quality MPEG-2 video encoder, and the resulting picture quality must be comparable to or better than that typically available within the industry."

ok. what is a video that is comparable to the ones in the industry? Do they mean shooting with Film or HD? Or they value the content?

I will be using:
XL1s, Premiere Pro, After Effects, probably Magic Bullit... just to make the video as good looking as possible..
Is that enough?

The camera is fine. You're going to need very high quality encoders to make the MPEG 2 signal. Most software only encoders will not produce extremely high quality images. Hardware encoders are expensive, but produce a much better image and are much quicker.

Runs some short tests with your video equipment and MPEG 2 encoder to check the image quality. If you see artifacts from motion and compression you will need to review your hardware and software.

hhhmmm... so what are my options for a good encoder, besides the one that comes with Premiere ? even if it costs few extra bucks

See the Canopus line of encoders, widely regarded as some of the best in the industry.

http://www.canopus.us/US/products/Index/products_mpeg1_2_capture.asp

TMPGENC is a good encoder for a low price.

For short films you can use the maximum bitrate (minimal compression) to get very good quality. You might want to try Premiere's encoder first to see if it's good enough.

Yeah, you don't NEED high quality hardware MPEG2 encoders, although they are nice and they do their thing much faster. When I recently put my movie out to DVD, encoding the feature took approximately 4.5 hours for a 1.75 hour movie. However, the resulting video looks amazing on my TV. Even the extras, which we encoded at exactly half the bitrate and encoded at 352x480 instead of 720x480, look pretty damned good.

We used TMPGEnc Plus 2.5 and modified some of the default wizard parameters. It's quite a decent encoder, although because it's software, it's going to be slow. That's really your only problem with them (although the speed of hardware ones also means you can do other things like noise reduction and still come in faster than software, so it may look better).

The Dolby warning was about picture quality, and as long as you take steps to make sure your video doesn't look like VHS or some guy's home movie off the net with MPEG blocks half the screen wide, you'll be fine.

Some very good software encoders (in order of quality):

1. Canopus ProCoder (www.canopus.com)
2. CCE (CinemaCraft encoder) (www.cinemacraft.com)
3. TMPGEnc (www.tmpgenc.net)

Especially CCE but also TMPGEnc have quite the learning curve.
There are lot of tutorials for these packages on the web due
to them being used a lot in DVD ripping.

Noone's mentioned the MainConcept MPG2 encoder (included in Vegas also). Does it suck?

Aaron

Well it is all personal ofcourse. I haven't had the time to truly
test it. I just heard from a lot of people whom I trust that those
3 are some of the best (standalone) software encoders out
there.

From a couple of tests the Vegas encoder looked fine as well
indeed. Go with whatever floats your boat.