Is the only way to do this in Adobe Premiere by using the “export to dvd” setting? I tried it, put Premiere does not want to find my dvd writer. It lists nothing in the burner selection window. I tried saving as mpeg2-dvd, but when I put it into a dvd player, nothing plays. 
Any suggestions?
you need a dvd authoring type programme.
Check out adobe encore
Premiere should be able to make DVD’s. Are you by any chance using a trial version? I think the dvd feature is disabled for that.
timmatron is right, premier pro 2 can burn straight to dvd, but in the
demo its disabled.
we’ve just had this same issue where premiere didn’t see our dvd burner. we downloaded a driver for the burner from the manufacturer (freecom in this case) and then it saw it just fine.
I’ve started to learn the H.264 codec from Quicktime. It’s taken a while to find some good settings, but once you start getting the hang of it you can really get some very good quality compression.
Here’s a couple of links
Thanks guys. I’ll look right away for the driver!
Quicktime H.264 is not compatible with home DVD’s
What do you mean? What kind of dvd’s is it compatible with? On our last production dvd, i was pretty sure thats what we used for the final dvd product - which is viewable on normal dvd/tv sets. I could be wrong though since we worked with another company to make them.
From the H.264 link “H.264 achieves the best-ever compression efficiency for a broad range of applications, such as broadcast, DVD, video conferencing, video-on-demand, streaming and multimedia messaging.”
Your Quicktime was recompressed to mpeg2 for the dvd, best to send either a uncompressed avi/quicktime or better to do your own mpeg compression.
You know what, I take back the good things I said about h.264. As was mentioned ealier it has a major problem in washing out the colors so I’m going to look into something else now.
i always export as uncompressed then use tmpgenc to convert to mpeg2 since its quite fast and gives nice quality and whats more…its free
I’d like to see an example of this. We’ve had great success with it, with the best tradeoff of filesize/quality/compatibility. You may want to go through all your QT settings, sometimes I’ve seen a video filter turned on that does a brightness adjustment that washes everything out.
Ok, here is an example. The clips on the left are uncompressed, and on the right are the H.264 compression. Now, it’s not horrible, but still when you work hard to get it just the way you want it and then it gets changed on you at the end it is a little frustrating. And it’s not just me. I’ve found other threads about this problem too, but no solution to it.
Thanks for the example… I’ll have to look more into this.
Here is another topic on cgtalk that outlines the same problem. So I’m not sure if it is a conversion problem, or compression problem. I don’t think I will give up on h.264 because the compression is pretty remarkable overall. I will just try to find suitable filter settings to adjust the saturation and contrast to get a similar result to the uncompressed version.
http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?t=327725&highlight=h.264
From Adobe Premiere? Saving as what file format? I’ll search now for this tmpgenc.
usually i save an uncompressed avi from AE or premiere then use tmpgenc which is from www.tmpgenc.com
You can tweak your quicktime h.264 to compensate this slight washing out just accessing the filter option on export settings. There’s a preview image, although is pretty small, but i guess you could test render some options till u find a preset which suits your needs. In a similar fashion, u could pre-correct your footage prior to h.264 conversion, but i find it a kind of blind leap unless you know exactly what u will be getting.
H.264 is the standard for quicktime broadcasting on the internet, so i’d better play with it a bit more before dumping it…You won’t be able to use it with your DVD as i stated before, because home DVD’s need MPEG2 files to play.
You can, however use a quicktime inside a DVD, but that’s not a DVD-VIDEO and therefore will only be played on computers WITH quicktime 7 or later installed, NOT home players…I know some home players are able to play divx files, but i dont think any of them would be able to play quicktimes…
whats the whole conversation about. why not just compress direct to mpeg2 when doing your dvd. either that or bounce the video to avi or mov uncompressed then convert to mpeg2. more or less it makes absolutely zero sence compression the file to something then compressing it again to mpeg2. thats quality loss that should be avoided