Exporting to burn on DVD

[Vincent Rosati]

Welcome David,
Great question. If you’re going to DVD, you probably want to export as MPEG-2.

Short answer:
There’s no way to compress the video and have it look ‘as good’ as your AVI.

Long answer:
Your goal might be to produce a DVD-Video compliant MPEG file, that will not be transcoded by your DVD authoring software.

Out of Premiere, you would want to use Adobe Media Encoder – Under File/Export/Adobe Media Encoder. I use Main Concept MPEG Pro, a plugin that basically does the same thing.

Anyway, under Format you would choose MPEG2-DVD. Boost the quality as high as it will go. Under the Bitrate settings I would select the VBR 2-pass option.

For the audio settings, PCM is the standard. You would have to look at the specifications of your authoring software to determine if Dolby or MPEG are acceptable. Again, your goal is to produce an MPEG2 file that does not undergo an additional transcoding while importing into your authoring software.

For the Multiplexer settings, the simplest option is to enable DVD Multiplexing. This will create a single MPEG2 file.

In the end, you’ll want a file that fits on the DVD, about 4.35 GB for a single layer DVD. Unfortunately, with Adobe Media Encoder, I don’t think it calculates a file size (unsure). This means you might have to do some math estimates to determine the appropriate bitrates in your video settings.
Main Concept does give you this estimate figure.

Near the bottom of this forum there is a thread titled ‘Where is my audio?’, there might be some other useful tips in there.

Vince

[David Woolford]

thank you very much for your help. I will let you know what I discover.