[Jeff Pulera]

Hi Neil,

At the most basic, you can from Premiere simply choose “File > Export > Encore”, hit a few buttons in the pop-up, including burn without menus, and it’s pretty automated from there so you don’t really have to “learn” Encore if you don’t want/need to.

If you don’t really see much future need to keep making Blu-ray discs for yourself, take a look at the Western Digital WDTV, it is a little box with HDMI out and USB inputs. Put your video clips on a USB drive and play them out through the WDTV, it prefers H.264 but works with several formats.

Jeff Pulera

[Jeff Pulera]

PS – I see you are doing 2-pass VBR rendering, but in my experience, that is a waste of time for most projects (unless 2+ hours), as 2-pass takes twice as long to encode. The average bitrate in your settings was 5.5, and if you do CBR 5.5, I know it will look good and get done faster

Jeff

[Jeff Pulera]

Computer displays are non-interlaced and that’s why interlaced video doesn’t look good on your computer, but TV sets (old and new) are made to display interlaced signals, so leave interlaced as interlaced for TV viewing, but if creating video for the web (YouTube, etc.) then you can and should deinterlace.

Unless you have a third-party DVD authoring solution, you will end up using Encore for the DVD in the end. You could just use File > Export > Encore, or use Adobe Media Encoder to create the content, and then import those assets into Encore later, your choice, even if you want to burn without menus. Maybe you are new at DVD burning? You can’t just create the MPEG-2 files are burn them on a disc, you must use an authoring program even without menus

Jeff

[Jeff Pulera]

Hi Steve,

I just re-read you posts and maybe we need to back up a bit and start over. Maybe I should be asking how you came to choose a 1440×1080 preset? This is for HDV tape. Full HD is 1920×1080 (1.0 square pixel aspect ratio). To fit 1080i video on DV cassettes as HDV format, they reduced the resolution down to 1440×1080 and changed the PAR to 1.333 (note that 1440×1.333=1920 so playback looks correct on TV).

So, if you are creating original animation and are not working with HDV sourced material, you may wish to avoid the whole 1440×1080 thing and work with 1920×1080, or 720p HD at 1280×720, as both are natively 16:9 HD formats with 1.0 PAR.

The reason your 1440×1080 render doesn’t look right during computer playback is because the player assumes square pixels, and displays the 1440×1080 image as is, it is not adjusting for 1.333 PAR. HDV cameras and Blu-ray disc players take this into account and do of course properly play back this material.

Jeff Pulera
Safe Harbor Computers

[Jeff Pulera]

Are you in an Adobe 1920x1080i project to begin with? You can use Export to Encore to create a DVD. Adobe has a quality issue when going from HD to DVD, but with CS4 Adobe Media Encoder, in the Advanced Settings, there is a “Max Render” button and this will create a better quality, though it takes longer. You do not need to deinterlace, 1080i footage is best viewed as an interlaced DVD.

Back to the Export Settings, choose MPEG-2 for DVD, and an NTSC DVD widescreen preset, and from there, you can change the encode setting if you wish. An easy way to figure the encode rate is 560/minutes and just round down a bit. A 90-minute video would be 6.0, 120 minutes is 4.5, just don’t go above 8 even for a short video, in fact I never go above 7 because some players could have issues with high bitrates on burned media. Also, I typically use CBR rather than VBR. Just choose a preset as mentioned above, and adjust CBR and data rate and you should be good to go. Above rates assume Dolby audio, which should be default in Encore.

Jeff Pulera
Safe Harbor

[Jeff Pulera]

Hi Rob,

Consider the Matrox MXO2 Mini. In Premiere, you choose a Matrox preset to match your footage, i.e. 1920x1080i 29.97 then Import your XDCAM EX footage and get realtime output via HDMI and analog, plus realtime downconvert. Also includes LCD monitor calibration utility for the HDMI output.

Supports 1080i 29.97 and 25, plus progressive as follows:

1080p 23.98, 25, 29.97
720p 23.98, 25, 29.97, 50, 59.94

Also available with MAX option that exports to H.264 formats faster than realtime if you do much of that.

Jeff Pulera
Safe Harbor Computers

[Jeff Pulera]

What format are you trying to export to? If you want to export back to tape, just use Export > Tape and the system renders the appropriate file in the background.

If you want to export for the web or something, you may need to change dimensions to correspond with square pixels to get proper output look, as HDV uses 1.333 pixel aspect ratio.

Let us know your intended delivery and a format can be suggested

Jeff Pulera
Safe Harbor

[Jeff Pulera]

DV is easy even on an old, slow system, something is wrong. The hard drive is overkill and maybe even behind the issue due to SCSI controller conflict or something. Is there another drive in the system you can try?

Jeff Pulera

[Jeff Pulera]

Ditto on Noah’s comments, for single-layer jobs, no issues creating DVD-R master for replicator. Use good media, and burn at a slower speed to ensure a quality burn for the master.

Jeff Pulera

[Jeff Pulera]

How about this – put the video you want to fade to on TOP of other layers, so instead of fading two layers out, you are fading one IN.

I’ve done that before in the situation you describe. If need be, use the Razor to cut a short piece of underlying clip and just move it straight up to top layer, add the fade, done.

Jeff Pulera
Safe Harbor Computers