How do you convert AVI (1hr. edited on premiere pro 1.5) to DVD, What is the best way/settings for high quality DVD?

An age old question. Search for bit rate, encoding, VBR, or CBR and you will find a legion of prior discussions.

If space on the DVD is not an issue I use VBR, 2-pass on the encoder but I set the min, avg, and max bit rate to the same value (usually 8-8.5mb is the highest depending on the bit rate of the audio source). However, for most projects I use VBR, 2 pass, min bit 4mb, avg bit 6mb, max bit 8mb. I really can't tell the difference between the two unless there is a ton of motion or changing scenes (both of which are not a problem for what I shoot). I probablly could go a little lower on the min bit rate and not lose much in the way of quality.

My suggestion is to experiment with short clips similar to what you plan on shooting. The main trade off is that the higher the avg bit rate, the less material you can fit on a DVD. For a single layer DVD, the above settings will give you no more than an hour per DVD.

Barry Oppenheim

I've never used Premiere (I have no idea whose encoder gets used with Premiere), but for video that can fit on a DVD at 8mbps, you're best off encoding at 8mbps CBR. Essentially, that's what you're doing when you set min, max and avg to 8mbps 2 pass VBR, but it takes a lot longer for the 2 passes, and the information gathered from the first pass analysis never really gets used.

I usually export out of PPRO 2 into an AVI and then encode with Encore 2 using:
VBR
2 PASS
MIN 1500
TARGET 7800
MAX 8000
Dolby 192

It seems to work pretty good across the board, but of course the best way is to try out different settings and become familiar with the quality of the the different bit rates and settings..Since the type of video as is motion, speed, etc will matter when it comes to the bitrate you select and the length of the video will also play a factor..

Where two pass VBR is real useful, is to maximize quality when you are encoding a file that has to be below 8mbps to be able to fit on the disk. If the video is short enough (basically an hour or less) there's no reason not to use the full 8mbps (that will give you maximum quality that meets the specs for a video DVD).

What Robert said..:)

I too am a CBR man when it comes to hour or less is most cases..

one deciding factor there is which one is easiest to play back on your typical dvd player.

i use vbr only, because the dvd player is reading less overall data off of the disc... dvd players use memory buffers, and when the disc read process hits a glich, the only thing displaying moving video is what's coming out of the buffer... less bitrate being read means that the buffer will playback longer.

if your cbr encoder will not do two-pass encoding, but it will with vbr, then it's a no-brainer... you pick the one that works with two-pass encoding.