Read First - My Old Computer including lots of notes about using Premiere with a Dv500 card, and my first experiences with a DVD writer
Read Second - My NEW Computer describing what I bought to build my own computer and save money, plus a few BUMPS I encountered during the building process so you will know what NOT to do
September 26 2004
Computer is complete, video hard drive is in the swap housing and software is installed, it is time for some testing
This is not a "technical" test with all start-stop times recorded (weather was nice, so I was running in and out to click a button on the computer and do work in the garage and yard) but my "overall" impression is anything that did not involve an external device (capturing from VCR or writing to a DVD) too about half the time as my previous computer... which, since disk access is involved and not everything is accomplished in memory by the CPU, makes me happy
To go with the new operating system, and to hopefully do all CD and DVD writing tasks from one program, I bought Roxio Easy Media Creator 7 to replace my old RecordNow DX for data writing and Sonic MyDVD for movie writing... but it turns out that Roxio7 will not use the version of MPEG files created by my Dv500 software, so I had to load the Sonic MyDVD version 4.0.4 I already had
One thing I found out about MyDVD is that if you feed it a file that is "exactly" 4.7 Gig it does not give any error messages... it simply will not burn the DVD... so I recoded the file from the Dv500, selecting a data rate which created a file slightly below the 4.7 limit, and MyDVD worked as usual to author the files and burn the DVD-R
Next will be to play that newly created DVD-R in the box in the bedroom, to be sure the authoring and burn process actually did work (after... the DVD-R did play, so all is working properly)
Adobe Encore December 04
What I have been doing to create a DVD is look at the data rate needs of each "scene" in my video, and export each scene separately using the MPEG creation process added to Premiere 6.02 by the Dv500's version 4.5a software, with a BitRate set to match the amount of movement of the individual scene
This works, and allows me to fit over one hour of video on a DVD, but is really tedious... so I downloaded the 150Gig demo of Adobe Encore DVD Creation software and tested
My first test consisted of dropping several hundred still pictures on the Premiere timeline (each picture set to display for 10 seconds) plus background music from a few CD's as well as some actual motion video clips... all of this designed to be a background slide show with video clips for a family party... and all of which came to 2.75 hours and a final AVI of 38 Gigabytes
My old method would have been to code the still picture slideshow parts to MPEG with a very low data rate, and the video clips with a higher data rate for motion... which would have taken me a LONG time to analyse each section and set the MPEG output options
Using Adobe Encore, I just gave it the 38Gig AVI file and created a simple menu... then clicked the "go" button and let Encore analyse the entire file and, using the 2-pass VBR technology inside Encore, had it both create the content and write the DVD
A few hours later I had a finished DVD for the party!
Offline Storage
I have been using DVD-R's to make copies of data files, as well as IMAGE files of my entire boot drive to be able to restore in case of problems, but was recently gifted a 250Gig hard drive so now plan to buy an external enclosure which will allow me to connect a USB cable when I want to copy files to the external hard drive, and then put the external drive on a storage shelf the rest of the time
I'll report back after I have the enclosure