Question by 1by1: How to export Adobe Premiere Pro CS4 video to DVD?
I have edited a movie in Adobe Premiere Pro CS4 and want to burn it to DVD. Exporting the media to DVD format using Encoder will take 130 hours as it shows (it’s a 2-hour video). I tried importing to Encore and it’s really slow as well. How can I burn the edited video more quickly to DVD?

Answer:

Answer by Bonce Bonce
On a 2GHz dual-core processor (enough to operate Premiere CS4), it could take maybe 10 to 16 hours to render 2 hours to DVD using Adobe Media Encoder or Encore at their default quality settings. It might take a little longer if you have lots of effects. It should not take 130 hours, but you still have to be patient if you want to render 2 hours of video to DVD at reasonable quality. You could try reducing the quality settings in Encoder to get a feel for how patient you will need to be, but I wouldn’t trust the displayed ETA.

It’s important to plan such renders for overnight (not a few hours before the render is needed, which I keep learning the hard way). If you’re going to regularly re-render a large project after small changes (e.g. for review purposes), try to manage the project as a series of smaller sequences for which you need only update the chapters which have changed in Encore (reimport the timeline for just that chapter, if it isn’t dynamically linked).

I don’t think it’s worth bothering to render out an intermediate file (using a quicker codec) to then use a separate encoder and DVD authoring package, unless you are already familiar and keen to use that other package (sounds like not).