Things to Remember

Keep in mind that the default Auto-play DVD setting does not provide any menu structuring; it simply plays whatever was exported from the moment you place the DVD in a DVD player. To create a menu-based DVD you must open the DVD Layout panel and choose Change Template to load a custom template that has menu structuring.

Because DV and HDV formats are already highly compressed you are likely to get visible artifacts and undesirable compression anomalies when using lower bitrates. When encoding DV footage to DVD, my quality settings are almost always maxed out with a bitrate of at least 5 to 6.0000 Mbps. Because DV is already highly compressed, throwing more bits at the DVD encode results in a better quality DVD. The previous bitrate range does not give you a full two hours of video on a DVD 5 (4.7 GB of space), but it certainly makes DV look great on a DVD.

When using 16x9 formats such as 1920x1080 HD, 1280x720 HD/HDV, or 1920x1080 HDV, you can easily make down-converted DVDs at 720x480 directly from your HD or HDV timeline. Because Premiere Pro does not offer HD DVD encoding, it will reduce the size of your video frame to fit in the 720x480 size that it encodes. Just remember to match the frame rate of your timeline with that of the preset you are using.

If you are using 24p HD material, use one of the High Quality 16x9 progressive presets. If you are using 1080i HDV (29.97), use one of the High Quality 16x9 DV presets and then reverse the field dominance from lower to upper (HDV is upper-field dominant).

And finally, although the presets are there for a reason, when you do decode to customize a preset take the time to save it so that if the encode is exactly what you want, you can reuse the settings time and time again.

In the next chapter, we'll look at Adobe Bridge and some of the new features that are available with Premiere Pro and the Adobe Production Studio.