how to save to dvd after exporting as mpeg-2 for dvd

[Vincent Rosati]

Hey Lillian,

You would need DVD authoring software, such as Encore. Exporting the DVD-Video/Encore compliant MPEG out of Premiere, as you intend, is what I would suggest.
As far as export settings, it depends in the specs of your video program. Always start with the presets.
Although, I’ll generally recommend DVD-Video, MPEG-2, VBR, 2-Pass, Multiplexed, audio set to PCM WAV.

Encore has menu templates that you can use, or open in Photoshop to edit.

One of the attributes that you would use in Encore is “First Play”. You would apply ‘First Play’ to a timeline or a menu. This attribute tells the DVD what item should be played first, when the DVD is inserted.

Hope this gets ya’ started,

Vince

[Lillian Fidler]

Thanks Vince!

So, would I export to an mpeg-2 first out of premiere using encoder, then open encore and import the files? Or would I export to encore first?

Also, I need to do a quick export of this file so if I export as a compressed avi, will this be able to be viewed very easily on a computer or a regular dvd player? When the person opens it say on their computer, would media player recognize and and play it? This is not for the final, just for a viewing and I’d like the best quality.

Thanks again.

Lillian

Lillian Fidler
Jillian Productions
St. John’s, Newfoundland
Canada

[Vincent Rosati]

“would I export to an mpeg-2 first…” Yes, but I’d suggest you first do this with a small 1-min. portion. Than you can attempt import into an Encore project to verify that the settings you are using are compliant. If the file isn’t compliant, Encore will re-transcode the file, which is not good.

Export/Movie as AVI will not be DVD compliant. Also, depending on the compressor you use, the file may not play on a Mac, if that is of any concern to you.

Another potential issue with AVI export is, if the video is interlaced you will usually see the interlacing during desktop display. Depending on your needs, this may not be acceptable. You could try enabling the Deinterlace option in the video field settings, although I don’t recall ever being happy with this.

Any time I know that I want to create a file for desktop playback, I will deinterlace in AE prior Premiere import for editing.
Creating a movie for DVD and Desktop is really two different projects.
You can deinterlace directly in Premiere, but it’s methods aren’t the best, although there are Premiere plugins that do this.
Also, you could attempt opening your Premiere Project with After Effects and deinterlace there. Depending on how you constructed the premiere project, this should work with AEs deinterlacing method. There are also some great deinterlacing plugins for AE.
Search the forum archive for more on deinterlacing, its a bit complicated and you can achieve many different results.

Vince

[Lillian Fidler]

o.k., I don’t think I want to fool around with the avi thing! I just started a test with a one minute piece and it’s doing it’s thing now. I did notice something that I wasn’t sure of in the settings and that was several options of 29.97, 23.96 (I think) … what would you recommend for those settings. I don’t have it in front of me now, but you probably will know what I’m referring to.

thanks!

Lillian Fidler
Jillian Productions
St. John’s, Newfoundland
Canada

[Vincent Rosati]

29.97FPS (AKA 60i) Is the standard NTSC Digital frame rate. 23.967FPS (AKA 24P) Is the standard ‘Film’ frame rate.

Unless that you know that you shot in 24P, you should probably use the Digital frame rate.
You might want to download GSpot. It’s a good tool, it gives you a bunch of info about any video files that you may work with, including frame rate…
https://www.headbands.com/gspot/

Vince

[Lillian Fidler]

Hi Again Vince for your input:

I just saved a couple of minutes of my project as vbr and the quality looks really quite good.

On an eariler post you mentioned the following:

The format is going to have to be Mpeg2 DVD, unless you are having someone else author it.

If the DVD is under 1 hour and you are sending this to a professional DVD duplication company, you can either export using the media encoder in Mpeg 2 DVD set to 8 MB CBR

and someone else mentioned to me that CBR might produce a better quality. I wonder if you could let me know what you see the differences being and if I should indeed stick with the vbr 2 pass?

thanks so much for your help!

Lillian

Lillian Fidler
Jillian Productions
St. John’s, Newfoundland
Canada

[Vincent Rosati]

Hey Lillian- Regarding CBR vs. VBR, and MPEG encoding in general, is quite complicated. AME gives you a glimpse into the complexity, but if you were to use Main Concept MPEG Pro, you would see how complex the decision process can be. I can’t fully explain because I don’t fully understand it.

Every commercial DVD that I have ever examined uses VBR. VBR allows for high bitrate spikes during high motion portions, and low bitrate/low data size savings during low motion portions. This is to say that VBR has less artifacting during high motion portions, compared to CBR.
I’m not sure how accurate AMEs file size estimate is, when preparing a VBR encode. So your encode could result in a file that is too large, and you would have to recalculate and re-encode.
A benefit of CBR is that you can reliably calculate the data rate of a given length program to fit on a certain size disk.
See this thread by Jeff Pulera:
https://forums.creativecow.net/readpost/205/872409
Although I can’t say this for sure, there might also be increased reliability in using CBR on burned DVDs, as opposed to pressed DVDs.

Personally, I always use VBR.

Regarding 2-Pass, definitely use it. If you are familiar with JPEG compression, you know it looks at a block of pixels and interprets th eblock into the JPEG matrix. With MPEG video, there is a temporal factor that is added, in that it looks at the block of pixels and than compares it to that block, forward and backwards in time. 2-Pass doubles the amount of processing, for a more accurate interpretation.

I’ve probably said too much 🙂

I hope this helps,

Vince

[Lillian Fidler]

Hi Vince:

That is quite complicated to be sure. I’m going to follow your advice and save with vbr. I did process a short clip and it looks really good after saving with vbr 2pass out of adobe premiere. It just saves one mpg file. So, when I import that into AME it should not do any processing to it, is that correct? (transcoding)

I’m getting there :.)

cheers,

Lillian

Lillian Fidler
Jillian Productions
St. John’s, Newfoundland
Canada

[Lillian Fidler]

one other thing… under multiplexer settings it asks whether you want constant or variable bitrate and buffering – the default is variable… is that the correct setting?

thanks again!

Lillian Fidler
Jillian Productions
St. John’s, Newfoundland
Canada

[Lillian Fidler]

sorry for all these posts! Just want to double check my settings with you before I start the huge rendering job.

summary:
ntsc, 720×480, 29.97 drop frame, fields order progressive, quality 5.0
48khz, 16 bit stereo pcm
vbr, 2 pass, min 1.50, target 4.00, max 7.00
gop settings, m frames: 3 n frames: 15

multiplexer: dvd variable

Lillian Fidler
Jillian Productions
St. John’s, Newfoundland
Canada