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Tim,

Maybe you selected a “generic” MPEG-2 profile instead of a DVD MPEG-2 one in ProCoder’s export wizard? While sequence headers are required for DVD compliant video, they are not mandatory for all MPEG-2 variations.

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The easiest solution would be to create a motion menu background video in After Effects or Premiere with the 4 thumbnailed videos, exported as a DV AVI file. The text buttons are then added in Encore.

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Even quicker: If you are editing in Premiere Pro you could also export the timeline directly to a DVD without menu.

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[Bob Cole] “Can I disregard these?”

You can. 🙂 It means that with that DVD, the “title” and “menu” buttons on the player’s remote control won’t have a function and that at the end of the video the player will just stop.

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Tim,

Deinterlacing or using the “flicker removal” filter in Premiere may lessen the juddering. What either option does is making thin horizontal lines and sharp edges softer. That will help to get rid of some of the flickering.

My guess about what is the problem could be off; without having seen what you are seeing we could be talking about entirely different phenomena… 😉

[Roadkill]

Tim,

Always leave “Optimize Stills” off! It doesn’t optimize stills, but it tries to optimize harddisk space usage of stills, which is hardly relevant with today’s harddisk sizes, while it creates compatibility problems in other applications like Adobe’s own Encore.

If the juddering stills are really still, the problem could be that it contains thin horizontal lines and sharp contrast changes. Because TVs and video monitors are (usually) interlaced displays, thin lines will be displayed only half of the time – switching on and off 25 or 30 times per second. It may help to have a look at:
Adapting print graphics for video
Why you need fuzzy titles and a good codec

If there is some movement in the stills (e.g. the crawling text) the problem can also be caused by an incorrect field order setting.

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Note: The “loop point” settings delays the appearance of the subpicture highlights on the menu. Should you be using other, full color button images then these should be made part of the menu background video before importing in Encore.

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In case you are using the 1.0 trial version of version: The trial can’t be updated, instead you could download the 1.5 trial. If it is the full version there may be a problem with the Windows registry. For this you should contact Adobe tech support who can walk you through the necessary steps.

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Encore 1.0.x doesn’t support QuickTime. Encore 1.5.x supports self contained QuickTime, but no QT reference files.

If you don’t want to export DV AVI from Premiere 6.5, I would suggest to use the Mainconcept MPEG encoder plug-in that came with Premiere to export MPEG-2 elementary (video only) files and use these in Encore. Make sure to update the original encoder plug-in to version 1.2 or 1.3b: Adobe MPEG

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If you exported from Premiere with the “Optimize Stills” setting enabled, I would suggest to export again with this setting disabled.

And not related, but if you haven’t updated Encore 1.0 to 1.0.1 yet: Encore DVD 1.0.1 update.