[Jeff Pulera]

It is true that the only way to make a file smaller is to lower the bitrate. However, using a smaller frame size will get you more quality at that lower bitrate, since there is less video to compress.

So for instance, at a given (low) bitrate, a 720p video should in theory look better than a 1080p video at that same bitrate, since far less pixels needed to be compressed. The question is then, how will the video be used/viewed? 720p is still HD video and would seem to be a better choice in this situation. Or how about 360p, which is 640×360?

Not knowing the content of the video or intended viewing methods, hard to say, but if for instance this is a talking head video, 360p could look just fine!

Thanks

Jeff Pulera
Safe Harbor Computers

[Jeff Pulera]

Wasn’t looking for sample video, just a still image showing the Encore screen to illustrate the gaps you are viewing. But it really sounds like Encore is not part of the issue at all, as it exists in the video you are exporting from Premiere, correct?

What if you take the video and audio you exported from Premiere, and Import them back into Premiere and put them on a timeline? Let’s see if the issues exist there.

What kind of music clips are you using in Premiere? It can misbehave sometimes with .mp3 clips, best to convert them to 16-bit 48k .wav files before using in Premiere

Thanks

Jeff Pulera
Safe Harbor Computers

[Jeff Pulera]

Hi Lauren,

Settings look great, except pushing bitrate to 9. While that is within “DVD legal spec”, remember that we are working with burned/recordable media and not a store-bought pressed disc. DVD players are less forgiving of DVD-R media so most folks you find on the forums will stick with 7 or 8 as a safe maximum. Data spikes can cause playback errors, for instance suddenly jumping from 5 to 9mbps at a scene change. Thus my recommendation of CBR 8 for this project length.

Still interested in seeing those “gaps” that are appearing in Encore timeline, have never seen that behavior before.

Thanks

Jeff Pulera
Safe Harbor Computers

[Jeff Pulera]

Can you post an screen grab to show what you are seeing? I thought you were losing audio after creating a chapter point, but it sounds like you have these gaps as soon as clips are imported into Encore?

Jeff Pulera
Safe Harbor Computers

[Jeff Pulera]

The size of your files really has no bearing on the workflow other than setting the bit rate to best fit material onto the disc. Not sure what the reference about Media Encoder means – when I’m done in Premiere, I just use Export Media direct from the timeline.

As for VBR versus CBR encoding, here’s my take on it. For videos of about an hour or less, I see no point in using VBR. You can encode the entire contents at the highest, consistent quality, using CBR 8.0. CBR = Constant Bit Rate.

Now if you have a two-hour video, for which the average bit rate will need to be about 4.6, you’ve almost decreased quality by half (twice the compression applied) from the 8.0 setting. What VBR (Variable Bit Rate) will do for you is to apply a higher-than-average bit rate to scenes that could use the quality bump (lots of detail and motion in the scene), and a lower-than-average bit rate to scenes that will look fine with more compression (still image or title screen, scene with little motion). Basically, the amount of compression on each scene is varied to best allocate the available space on the disc to the scenes that need it. Why waste a bunch of space on a screen that is black or otherwise very simple? Let’s take that “space” and use it elsewhere as needed.

We still don’t know what kind of source video you are editing or settings used. A screen shot of Export Settings oftens tells us a lot.

Thanks

The benefit of the 2-Pass VBR is that encoding takes two passes. The first pass analyzes the content to see how complex each scene in the video is, so the encoder can figure out which parts to use higher or lower date rates on. The actual encoding is done on the second pass, using the data collected during the first pass.

2-Pass VBR is great to get the best overall quality across a variety of scenes, when using lower bit rate (long videos). For a short video of 10 minutes, 30 minutes, 60 minutes, where you can use the maximum encoding rate of 8.0 then why bother with allocation of bit rates up and down, just do the whole thing in the best quality, right?!

Jeff Pulera
Safe Harbor Computers

[Jeff Pulera]

Your source is 16:9 (widescreen) and the projector is only 4:3 at the 1024×768 unfortunately. Short of finding a better projector, I think I’d be converting the HD footage to 1024×768 as letterboxed video. The quality will be somewhere between 720p and SD video.

Export as .mp4 for playback compatibility.

Thanks

Jeff Pulera
Safe Harbor Computers

[Jeff Pulera]

This doesn’t sound right. Help us to help you, we don’t even have a clue what file type you are outputting or what settings may have been used. Please post a screen shot of the Export Settings panel so we can see what you were doing.

Premiere does not like editing variable frame rate, and I’d be very surprised if it was outputting such a thing

Thanks

Jeff Pulera
Safe Harbor Computers

[Jeff Pulera]

Hi Lauren,

Basically, don’t use .mp4 files in Encore. The DVD spec says that the video must be MPEG-2 (with specific settings). Anything else you put into Encore – .mp4, .mov, .avi, etc. – will be transcoded by Encore to the appropriate MPEG-2 format before burning. Period. What are the specs of the .mp4 video – frame size, frame rate, etc.?

Therefore, it is recommended to simply create the proper files to start with when exporting from your editor. When exporting from Premiere, choose MPEG-2 DVD as the format (must include “DVD”) and then select an appropriate preset, such as NTSC DV Widescreen or whatever suits the footage being used.

Under the VIDEO tab for export, you may need to adjust the bit rate depending on length of video – that’s another discussion. Rule of thumb, 560/minutes = bit rate, but not to exceed 8 for shorter videos (<60 minutes).

In Export Settings panel, at upper left where it says Output Settings, change setting to Scale to Fill only if you are seeing black bars on left and right of the video preview, as is typical when scaling from HD source.

Also at bottom of Export Settings, if source is HD then select Max Render Quality which will aid in downscale quality.

Using default MPEG-2 DVD export settings, you will get separate video and audio files as .m2v and .wav formats. In Encore, use Import As > Timeline and then select both those assets together and they will come in as a single timeline. By default, Encore is going to transcode the uncompressed .wav audio to Dolby Digital. This will greatly reduce the audio file size, so if combined .m2v and .wav might at first seem too large to fit the DVD media, the shrinking of the audio should fix that (assuming encoding bit rate was correct when assets were exported from Premiere).

This workflow should cure any issues you are having and will provide best end results.

Thanks

Jeff Pulera
Safe Harbor Computers

[Jeff Pulera]

Hi Samantha,

I think we’re putting the cart before the horse here. We should be looking at the overall workflow before anything else.

First off, what are the dimensions of the video source clip, such as 720p (1280×720) or whatever? It is typically best to edit in a Sequence whose settings match the video (frame size, frame rate, pixel aspect, fields). The simplest way to get there is to right-click the video clip in the Project Bin and select New Sequence from Clip. Now you have a good foundation on which to base your work.

From there, what is the intended destination of the edited video? For YouTube export, choose H.264 and then there are presets for YouTube that you can select.

Please let us know the specs of the video source and we can proceed from there with ideas for the best workflow.

As for Scale to Frame, if it comes down to needing to use that, it can actually be enabled as a default in Preferences. Then any clips Imported after making that change will automatically be scaled to fit.

Thanks

Jeff Pulera
Safe Harbor Computers

[Jeff Pulera]

I’d guess that the computer itself is several years old, based on using CS5 and GTX570 – you didn’t tell us the processor used, which is most important thing.

Regarding drive speed, probably not the issue. at least for playing native footage – 4K from consumer/prosumer cameras might be only 100mbps, which is equivalent to 4 DV streams, which most any SATA drive can handle with ease. Of course, when you get into “Professional” formats then the codecs can be much heavier and would indeed require RAID storage.

Really, I think that overall you just have a computer that is getting older and that is the core issue, it just can’t keep up.

Please let us know which processor you are running and what the footage is, from what device (camcorder model or action camera, etc).

You also mentioned a stutter after render – do you mean you rendered part of the timeline to “green”? In that case, what Preview codec are you using? That could actually be overwhelming the hard drive, if the Preview codec is heavier than the source, which is very likely as source codecs are typically H.264-based and the Preview codec will be something less compressed, which for 4K means big files!

Thanks

Jeff Pulera
Safe Harbor Computers