Best workflow for AVCHD from PPro to DVD in Encore?
Stephen Pickering122 Sep 11, 2010 10:53 AMHi there,
Basically I am editing HD footage to be encoded as stadard DVD video. Using PPro and Encore CS5.
In the past I have used only SD in PPro and exported an avi which I then let Encore encode automatically. Recently I shot something with a Panasonic HMC40 which creates AVCHD footage (1080 60i in this case). I edited this in PPro CS5 and exported as DVD m2v + ac3. It's 2 hour dance recital with an intermission in the middle. I am making a standard DVD, not an HD Bluray, etc.
I thought this workflow worked OK except the quality was not as good as I expected even when encoding at "Medium" quality (1 pass variable bitrate) via Media Encoder. I exported in three pieces totaling 4.2GB so I don't think the compression was too high which would cause image degradation. We also experienced skips and stutters in a few parts of the disk- this was all on one particular DVD player which might just be the player. In my past experience stutters were usually due to the bitrate being too high, but again for a two hour video I can't believe the bitrate could have been too high. I tried importing the entire video via Dynamic Link in Encore which I then transcoded "Automatically" (2-pass vb) which gave a file size of 3.8GB. This transcoded timeline had a noticeable image loss compared to the first m2v files which, again, didn't seem to be too impressive in the first place. Plus the 2 hour dynamically linked video took nearly 8 hours to encode! My system is fairly good I think (Nvidia GeForce GTX 260, 8GB RAM, Windows 7 64, Intel Xeon x3440) I don't recall the export from PPro taking nearly this long to export as m2v.
This brings up 2 questions:
Should I be exporting an m2v+ac3 file directly from PPro? Again, even with large projects I thought the automatic settings in Encore encoded better than the same automatic settings in PPro, but if PPro's export/encode is causing stutters then I have to use Encore. Then, should I be importing AVIs instead of the Dynamic link to avoid the speed issue? This is the first of 3 DVDs I need to finish so I would like to figure out the workflow on this first disk before proceeding to the final two.
FYI the menu has the following buttons: "Play All," "First Half," "Intermission," "Second Half." Originally with the 3 individual m2vs from PPro I had unique timelines and for the "Play All" I just had a "Playlist" linking one timeline after the other. Now with the single 2 hour timeline I have a "Chapter Playlist" for each button except the "Play All" which plays the timeline in it's entirety. Is there one way that is better than the other?
Thank you very much for any ideas!
-Stephen




