Premiere Elements 11 DVD Authoring Quality

[GreenAcres]

I'm considering purchasing Adobe Premiere Elements 11. So far I like everything and the output seems much higher quality than my AVS4YOU. My question is about the built in DVD authoring feature. It appears to be very low quality. When I used the built in DVD authoring the final output didn't look very good. There also doesn't appear to be very many options when authoring the DVD. There is a slider to adjust from Most Video to Highest Quality which I assume changes the bitrate but that is the only setting I see. I got much higher quality when I saved to the "computer" and then chose the MPEG option. Using this option there are a ton of settings that you can change depending on needs. After ecoding/saving to MPEG I authored with VideoRedo and the final result was very good. Am I missing something or do most people just not use the built in DVD authoring?

[lordsmurf]

The built-in authoring options that come with Premiere -- both the $500+ Pro, and the sub-$100 Elements -- are not very good, no. Few people use them. Premiere is great for editing, pretty good for exporting, but it's simply not authorware.

In this field, DVD Studio Pro is very common. Yes, that means most place have both Mac and Windows systems. (They're just tools! No rule that you can only pick one!) But that's really the only one on a Mac, aside from (again) Premiere. DVDSP is now part of the Final Cut package, bundled together.

There's a number of options on Windows, be it Scenarist on the high end, Sony Architect in the mid range, or Ulead DVD Studio Pro or DVD-Lab Pro on the low end (yet still very much pro software, $200+ MSRP). As technology ages, and time goes by, the options are less and less. But the "old" software from the likes of Ulead/MediaChance still works fine. Better than consumer software, old or new.

We use DVD Studio Pro, Ulead DVDWS2, and TMPGEnc Authoring Works (Blu-ray, menu0-less DVD).

We NEVER use the templates. Those all suck, regardless of price range. My menus are nice.

[GreenAcres]

Thank-you LS. I really like the Elements. I just wanted to make sure that I wasn't missing something on the authoring. I'm trying to avoid past mistakes by doing it all my way. Just for grins and giggles and because I'm going to be broke after buying Elements, how does the VideoRedo authoring rate?

[lordsmurf]

VideoReDo and Womble Video Wizard DVD authoring isn't as good as TMPGEnc Authoring Works 4 or 5, which itself is not as good a Ulead DVD Workshop 2 (DVDWS2).

Even Simple DVD Creator isn't bad, and it's freeware! It's best for menu-less discs, however. There's no GUI for menus.

There's several options that won't break the bank.