AE to DVD?

[Theodocious]

Hello,
So I'm trying to make a new demo reel. I have all my image sequences and quicktimes ready to put into AE. I'm wondering how to make the highest quality dvd? Do I just output the project as MPEG2-DVD and then burn it to DVD? Isn't that compressing the movie twice? I have AE 7 running on a WinXP laptop with a internal dvd burner. Sorry for the newbie question but I'm new to AE and this whole DVD burning process. Thanks.

By far your best option is to bring it into DVD studio pro 4 and author the disk in there. If you just burn the Mpeg 2 (not sure if that's what you meant) and put the file on the disk it won't play in a dvd player. it needs to be muxed (made into the proper file structure). Another decent option if you don't need menus is to bring it into premiere as an AVI or image sequence + wav and then render directly to DVD in "file->export to dvd"- it also does the muxing for you.

[Mylenium]

By far your best option is to bring it into DVD studio pro 4 and author the disk in there. If you just burn the Mpeg 2 (not sure if that's what you meant) and put the file on the disk it won't play in a dvd player. it needs to be muxed (made into the proper file structure). Another decent option if you don't need menus is to bring it into premiere as an AVI or image sequence + wav and then render directly to DVD in "file->export to dvd"- it also does the muxing for you.

Huh, DVD Studio? He said he's on Windows!!! And Premiere's DVD burning isn't particularly good, so he'd be ill-advised to use it.

Mylenium

[Mylenium]

I'm wondering how to make the highest quality dvd? Do I just output the project as MPEG2-DVD and then burn it to DVD?

Yes, basically you have to output a program stream. However, just putting it on a disk won't do anything. As stated by Theodocious already, it needs to be multiplexed. For this you are going to need programs like Nero or Encore or any other DVD-authoring program for that matter.

Isn't that compressing the movie twice?

No, it isn't. Multiplexing itself does not re-compress, it only re-organizes the internal data structure. If you import a properly encoded M2V e.g. into Encore, it will not transcode again. Other programs should behave the same (at least Scenarist and ReelDVD, which I also know, do), but you may need to manually force them to not transcode.

Mylenium

[electrodan]

Thanks for the responses. So I should have said that I have Sonic Record LE. It was preinstalled on the laptop. So to recap... should I save a .m2v or a quicktime out of AE7 and then bring that into my DVD authoring application. Thanks for the help.

[Mylenium]

Thanks for the responses. So I should have said that I have Sonic Record LE. It was preinstalled on the laptop. So to recap... should I save a .m2v or a quicktime out of AE7 and then bring that into my DVD authoring application. Thanks for the help.

Dunno that specific tool (ever since Sonic have been buying so many smaller firms it gets extremely confusing), but usually they prefer already encoded M2V. Since it has LE in its name, it's probably not supporting many formats, not even Quicktime. Most of those low-fi tools only transcode DV, which is kinda crap, so you'd be better off exporting M2V directly from AE.

Mylenium

[electrodan]

Got it. Thanks for your help Mylenium.

[StructAural]

Hello there, I thought I'd resurrect this thread as I've a similar problem. I'm on a quad-core Mac using CS3. I made a pretty high res movie (1200x850) that I show using quicktime. It was a showcase for some colleagues work and I now want to author it to DVD so they can keep a copy for themselves.

It's 25 frames a second, progressive and 35 minutes long (42,000 frames), took quite a while to recode from lossless to H.264 with added sound originally (about 4 hours) as quicktime seems to replay H.264 better than lossless. Dunno why as lossless doesn't need to uncompress - must just be the sheer volume of data.

Anyway today I thought a good way to recode it for DVD was to put it into an AE document that is 720x576 resize it to fit and export a MPE2-DVD using the built it coder (MainConcept). But it's giving me an estimated render time of 8 hours! (Though I'm using pixelmotion on the layer to help with field renders) Is there a better way?

I'm now using frame mixing and it's giving a more reasonable 2,5 hours. Am I using the fastest method (though quality is a consideration)? - I also have Adobe Encore and Premiere if these would be better. I don't own any FinalCut studio products. I'm a bit of a newbie (Cinema4D is my usual platform though I've been using the superb AE more and more). I'm also giving VisualHub a go in the background using the original 1200x850 mp4. It's very quick though I suspect the results will be less than desirable.

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