A simple guide to making a DVD with Adobe Encore and Premiere Pro CC

Note that you can no longer download Encore CS6 – even if you paid for a perpetual licence of CS6 originally. However, if you have an installer it should still install and activate and then you can export from Premiere Pro as per this guide.

First make the video files in Premiere Pro. If you choose the right kind if files then Encore will just use the files and not remake them

• In the export media dialogue box choose MPEG2 -DVD
• Choose the PAL DV or PAL DV widescreen preset (or NTSC if in you use NTSC TVS).  DO NOT choose one of the progressive presets and DVDs are hardly ever progressive.
• Go to the audio tab and choose “Dolby digital”
• Go back to the video TAB and go down to the section headed bitrate.  It is set to VBR, 1 pass.  The simplest thing is to take the middle slider – target bit rate – and move it up and down.  While doing this look at the estimated file size which is at the bottom above the button that says metadata.  If it is over 4000 MB adjust it until it is about 4000.
• Then export the file.

Next we load these files into Encore and burn the DVD

• Start Encore and make a new project.  Choose DVD and either PAL or NTSC depending on the format you are using.  It should match the video clips you made in Premiere.
• When open go to file – “import as” and choose “timeline”.
• Find the two files you made in Premiere – the M2V and the AC3.  Select both and click OK.
  This should make a timeline in Encore with the video and audio on it.  You can play it and should see your video.  If you look in the project window there is a “DVD transcode” column with should have “don’t transcode” written in it.  If it does not say this you did not make the right kind of file out of Premiere Pro.
• If you don’t need menus then you need to just set two other things – the end action of the timeline and the title button.
  Select the timeline in the project window and then go to the properties window.  The properties windows should have “timeline” written above it.  Find the heading that says “end action” and click on the arrow on the right of this box and choose “stop” or “Chapter 1” of the timeline you have made, depending on whether you want it to stop at the end or play it again.
• Go back to the project window and click on a blank space.  The properties window should now say “disc”.  Find the “title button” heading and click in the arrow on the right side of this.  Either choose Stop or chapter 1 again.  This governs what happens when someone presses the title button on their remote.  If not set Encore will complain when you go to burn the disc.
• Finally go to the build tab and set the format to DVD and the output to either DVD disc or DVD image.  DVD disc will try and write it directly to the disc. This should work although we have had occasional issues trying to write directly from Encore, especially under Windows 10.  DVD image will make an image you can burn with another program – like IMGBURN or Nero.  If making an image go to destination on the build tab and tell it where to make the image.

There are other ways of achieving the same things in Encore but following the above is probably the easiest.  You may also want menus which means you will have to do a bit more in Encore but the above should burn a disc without menus.

The biggest thing is getting the target bitrate right.  If you set it too high the files will be too big and won’t fit on a disc and Encore will remake it.  If too low you will have free space on the disc and have squeezed it a bit too much and possibly made the picture look bad.  Don’t bother going higher than about 8 if you are doing a small disc.  Lots of extra things could be said about this to do with CBR, VBR and 2 pass VBR but I have tried to keep this guide as simple as possible.