Questions about exporting LONG projects – DVD quality

[Vince Becquiot]

First, 2 hours on a standard DVD is not going to look very good no matter how you slice it. (Unless you know someone well placed in hollywood and your footage was shot on film)

The way around it is to use dual layer DVDs, which nearly double the recording time. There are a few caveats however.

First you need a dual layer capable burner. Second, the media is much more expensive. Third, the “home burned” DVDs are quite unreliable compatibility wise, and finally, there is often a small glitch as the laser switches to the second layer.

Still, to get the best quality on a single layer DVD, be sure to use a bitrate calculator, there are plenty of those online.

Cheers,

Vince Becquiot
Director | Editor

Kaptis Studios
Santa Rosa, CA

[Martin Albrecht]

Thanks Vince,

I tried to play around with exporting the project as mpg file regardless of the size – and the encoder in PP calculted approx 1.02 MB per second in the best quality, which would make the file around 7.5GB large, which i could live with and maybe then shrink it in Encore somehow or in som other way.

Regardless, I came across seeminlgy an unsurmountable problem – whenever i let it encode, it comes up with an “Unknown Error” straight away. Doesnt even start transcoding. When i try the same settings on a smaller shorter project, no problem. When i try it on the current big project, chop most of it off and leave just 4 minutes, it still wont do anything and come up with an error straight away. Any ideas what may be wrong? Has anyone had and “unknown error”?

Thank you kindly

[Vince Becquiot]

Try this calculator:

A 2 hour DVD would require VBR 2 pass, with something around 8 Max, 3.4 Average, and 1.3 MB/s Min.

I don’t know about the error, that could be a whole different thread.

You could also export as Quicktime animation 100%. (2 hours will be around 120 Gigs), then let Encore do an auto encoding. The Quicktime export from Premiere will be a lot faster than the Mpeg2 export and you won’t lose any further quality, which you can’t afford on a packed DVD.

Vince Becquiot
Director | Editor

Kaptis Studios
Santa Rosa, CA

[Martin Albrecht]

Hey there Vince,

I have followed your advice and sure enough, PP stared encoding, went on for several hours and when it got to the end, it came up with:
“error compiling movie. Unknown error”. It is the same message that comes up when i try to use the adobe encoder. I cant think why it does it with this proect and not with others. I only use a few titles, some mp3 music and footage from a dv camera captured through PP. There are 2 pieces of footage that are different – ultrasound of a baby, that i only imported and dont know how it was recorded. Could this be the reason?

Also, i realised that i kind of hijacked my own topic. should this be a new thread?

Thank you very kindly for your advice,
m.

[Martin Albrecht]

One more note – after reading up on the same problem elsewhere on this forum, i’d like to point out that the EXPORT TO DVD function WORKED and the movie is successfully burnt to a DVD. only after seeing the poor quality i tried different format of exporting and that’s when the error started coming up. I have not changed a single thing since successfully exporting to DVD.

Thank you very much again.
m.

[Jim Leonard]

If you’re having trouble exporting directly to MPEG-2, try exporting to Movie first (ie. render out your timeline to one large clip), then double-click the clip, THEN try your media encode to MPEG-2. I remember having this problem with 1.5 and that’s how I got around it.