Very happy with Premiere 6.5

[jankster]

I started out my video history going down the MPEG4 road (divx, xvid). Moved on to re-authoring DVD movies. Now I bought a nice Sony 1-MPixel CCD digital camcorder. I've spent a couple weeks looking for the best software to convert my DV to playable DVD. I worked alot with TMPG but never could get the quality I was looking for. I tried Ulead's DVD movie factory, and got better results then TMPG. I thought the best road was Premiere 6.0 to capture, then used the CCE 2.5 plugin to convert to MPEG2, however there is a memory leak and after a short time I run out of memory. 1 hour of DV is 13GB.

I now have used Premiere 6.5 and exported the capured DV using their internal MPEG2 converter. I set the video (in Premiere 6.5, not the MPEG2 module) to "remove flicker" or "deflicker" (can't remember what it is called). This produces the best deinterlacing I've ever seen, it plays very smooth on the computer screen. After playing with most the settings, I am very happy with NTSC-MPEG2 (not DVD-MPEG2, the average datarate is lower for the same file size) VBR 4500-avg, 6000-max, 0-min. This produces about 2 hours on a final DVD. I also tried DVDit to author. This is a VERY EASY to use software to quickly convert the MPEG2 into burnable DVD.

Now after spending 30 minutes composing this post, is there a better way???? I'm looking for quality, not speed.

Thanks ahead of time,

Jankster, the DV newbie

[OvERaCiD23]

CCE is the best. I just asked about the Adobe MPEG encoder as well. It does produce better results, but it's, ummmm, $2000. So I like Adobe's encoder. :)

[jankster]

OvERaCiD23,

I don't understand your reply

"CCE is the best"

"I just asked about the Adobe MPEG encoder as well. It does produce better results"

Which is better, reguardless of cost?

[onesoul]

I can say you can achieve excellent results with CCE, about the memory leak, try using the latest version.
I've been told that Mainconcept plugin delivers good results too.

[mikecito]

I've never had problems using the Adobe Premiere CCE Plugin 2.64.

I usually encode movies anywhere from 1 hour long to 3 hours long, and I've never had a performance problem or a crash. It produces quality that cannot be distinguished from the original dvd, but I've never taken screen shots to analyze still frames. It's good enough for my eye!

Along these same lines, while working with the DV in adobe premiere, do you get stalls when using live preview? Does it keep up pretty well? Whenever I import DVD mpg, it just cranks itself to a crawl when I play it back in the monitor window. But I've never used the DV format. I'm thinking about buying a camcorder, and I want to know that I won't go nuts trying to view what I've designed so far in the monitor window.

On a side note... if I use avisynth to frame serve a d2v file, it works fine... weird?

Thanks!

[jankster]

I upgrade CCE to 2.64 and no more memory leak. After more time I've come to the conclusion that the output of CCE and Premiere 6.5's mpep2 converter is the same, I play the results side by side and I can not tell which is better.

Premiere mpeg2 tool is 2X slower than CCE 2-pass, 4X slower in single pass, but you can encode VBR with audio too. CCE does not allow you to have a audio track in VBR, but does with CBR.

mikecito: I don't have any problems/stalls with Premiere. I have a ATI AIW 8500DV card and a AMD XP1700 with 256 DDR.