MPEG-2 Compression

Alright, here's today's dilemma:

This schoolyear (finally a Senior, hurrah!) I'll be making a movie, like I always do. The difference this year is that I've gathered enough experience (been doing it for about 3 years now) to undertake a bigger project. Soooo.... I'll be making a 30-45 minute film with a buddy of mine. Script is already written, it's funny, etc, so that's not the problem. The thing is (yes, he's finally getting to the point!) our A/V department purchased a couple of DVD burners for us, pretty much exclusively for our movie. Unless I'm mistaken, DVD video is compressed with the MPEG-2 codec. I assume that when we install the burners on the computers at school, the codec will be installed also, along with the software that comes with it. My problem is that I'll be doing most of the editing at home, but I don't seem to have the ability to compress video with the MPEG-2 codec in Premiere, or anywhere else for that matter; the closest I come to it is with DivX, which is MPEG-4. I'm seeing more and more people compress their films with MPEG (often times through Premiere). My question: how? Your help is appreciated.

Regards,
Kai

 

As far as I know, SVCD´s also use MPEG2 Compression. Therefore, a good place to go would be VCD Help.

There you should find plenty of freeware tools and help to convert an .AVI or whatever format you have your movie in to SVCD MPEG2 format.

Hope this helps and good luck with your project!

 

I personally use Discreet's Cleaner 5
Great program for encoding your movies into all sorts of formats.

That's not really much help though is it? lol

 

As Xel said, you could use Cleaner to encode in MPEG2.

DVD Studio Pro (for Mac) has a MPEG2 encoder that works in QT. I use that as I find it quicker than Cleaner.

Depending on what your school has, you may just want to take your final cut over on a firewire drive and do the MPEG2 compression there.

 

There are a couple of MPEG encoders that can plug into Premiere. I think that they are free. Try searching the web for BBmpeg and TPMPEG. That's what I use and they integrate seamlessly with Premiere.

 

Upgrade to Premiere 6.5.

Or export it in raw uncompressed .avi format and then follow these directions to burn to dvd.