I have a question concerning encoding. Why is it that I can only fit about an hour and a half on a DVD with just mediocre encoding...in reality , borderline good. Say 7/5/3.5 on the bit rates. I have asked Adobe if there is a full version of encoder or an alternate that is better but haven't gotten any good answer oher that stick to the presets. How can commercial DVDs hold a full 2 hours that I know is better quality than mine? As well, I have to be real careful on the bit rate as I have about 5 out of 50 customers on a particular project say that their DVD player stutters at certain points. I constantly have to battle between distortion in movement and high quality. Once again...a commercial one does not stutter or have artifact in fast movement. Is there a better plugin available....is that the issue? By the way, I was told by Adobe to export MPG from Premiere for best quality and to not do the conversion in Encore. Also note that the video in raw is pristine. I use a Canon XLH1 and a Sony FX1....SD concerning this issue.

I have a question concerning encoding. Why is it that I can only fit about an hour and a half on a DVD with just mediocre encoding...in reality , borderline good. Say 7/5/3.5 on the bit rates. I have asked Adobe if there is a full version of encoder or an alternate that is better but haven't gotten any good answer oher that stick to the presets. How can commercial DVDs hold a full 2 hours that I know is better quality than mine? As well, I have to be real careful on the bit rate as I have about 5 out of 50 customers on a particular project say that their DVD player stutters at certain points. I constantly have to battle between distortion in movement and high quality. Once again...a commercial one does not stutter or have artifact in fast movement. Is there a better plugin available....is that the issue? By the way, I was told by Adobe to export MPG from Premiere for best quality and to not do the conversion in Encore. Also note that the video in raw is pristine. I use a Canon XLH1 and a Sony FX1....SD concerning this issue.


Commercial dvds are larger than 4.7GB

So do you and others...have the same problem with dvd compatibility? Even if the commercial ones are larger, and they certainly are running higher bit rates, why don't people see pauses or inconsistancies in playback?

Are you only getting 1.5 hours??

Thanks

The question of size has been answered, as to quality, its best to let your DVD application do the compression.... say like Encore... I have never liked
the DVD output quality coming from Premier.

It bugged me so much that one weekend I went out and purchased a stack of DVD's and setup a short video and tried every setting I could find in Premier to dial it in.... got close but no cigar... at least it got me convinced not to use Premier on any DVD's that I wanted to be of any good
quality. About the only good thing about using the DVD output in Premier is
that it is fast.

If you don't have it, download Encore and test it to see if you get what you need. There is a built in tutorial that you can follow for the first test to get
you going...

Commercial DVDs are mostly dual layer = 9 GB. If you purchase dual layer writable media, then your problem should disappear.

Encore uses the same encoder as premiere, so I don't know why you think that the quality would be better.

If you don't like MainConcept in Premiere, try CinemaCraft Encoder Basic, it's very good, very fast, can be used as a Premiere plug-in and it's only $58 or something like that.

Commercial DVD's are replicated, whereas most DVD's we make are burned. Commercial ones are usually DVD9, whereas SL DVD's are DVD5.

The biggest difference is however the craftmanship of the people doing the encoding. Encoding is an art and you will only learn it with long experience. The tools used are also somewhat different, the AME from Mainconcept or the CinemaCraft Basic encoder are less than $ 100, which is a different league than Scenarist @ around $ 50K plus. Add to that the capability to use 9-pass VBR encoding with all the little tweaks you can set instead of simple 2-pass VBR and you may understand some of the differences.

To put it in another light, a Renault Clio racing car can never match the performance of a Formula 1 car, even though they drive a similar race on the same circuit. You get what you pay for.

Thanks to all for the input.

Is 8MB for the maximum rate a safe rate for most all DVD players, or would you stick to 7 or 7.5??

I use 8MB without difficulty, but use only quality disks and burn at lower speed than the disks are capable of.

Harm,

Agreed. Not even mentioning the hardware MPEG encoders...

best
bart

I would always use the highest Bit Rate that is in your editor if you want the best picture quality. Their should be around a 1 hour limit for standard 1 layer discs and around 2 hours for dual layer discs.

There as thread on DVD output quality on the adobe forum.

http://www.adobeforums.com/cgi-bin/webx/.3bc2be56

Anyone tried this?