I was wondering, since I just picked up a new DVD burner, what's the best way (money no object) to get my edited films on to DVD through Premiere. I was thinking Encore, but I know nothing about that program... can it take the edited film directly from Premiere or do I still have to export it? If I still have to export it, what settings do I need to export it to in order to get a good enough quality for DVD video?

I do appreciate any help, you guys have helped me out many times in the past...

Shane:

At my work, we're starting use Premiere Pro and Encore DVD.

To answer one of your questions, Encore and Premiere are extremely integrated. But, to burn a Premiere edited project to DVD with Encore, one would still have to transcode the project to MPEG-2 from whatever format you used to edit with in Premiere. One can transcode the file in Premiere or in Encore.

Perhaps, the best way in your scenario would be to transcode your project using Adobe Encoder functions in Premiere. Set all the settings for the video as you would to make your DVD. Create the MPEG-2 and import that as a video asset in Encore. Now, in Encore you can use all the functions you need to author your DVD.

Regards,

Kyle "Doc" Mitchell

Thanks, I'll have to get my hands on Encore and play around with it...

go over to adobe.com and take a good look at the premiere/encore user forums... i wouldn't spend a penny on the latest versions of that software until they get the bugs worked out... maybe it's okay now?

at the minimum, what you want to be able to do is to output the dvd-legal mpeg2 files directly off of the timeline of your video editing program... premiere 6.5 does a really good job of that, but adobe has upgraded their software packages so that everything is supposed to work together.

the downside to that inter-functionality is that some functions can be done better by other software packages... for instance, the native mpeg2 encoder that comes with premiere is very good, but canopus procoder in mastering mode puts out a better quality mpeg2 file... and you can access procoder directly from the premiere timeline.

same thing with the audio end of it... you might have to do some serious audio tweaking that you can't get with adobe software, so there is no advantage there to getting locked into the adobe mindset.

dvd menus... mediachance sells a great program for creating menus that is dirt cheap... but you'll have to know how to input the menus into whatever dvd authoring program you use.