DVD R Creation Saga

In April, I purchased a new Gateway 700 XL computer with a Pentium 4, 2.2 GHZ cpu. Prior to the purchase, I researched several of this variety of computer from various computer companies, but liked the Gateway the best except for the possible inclusion of a DVD-R drive. I knew that the state of the art of DVD-R drives was primitive at best. Writing a DVD-R that played on a variety of other computers or even DVD players attached to televisions was at best about a 50% chance of working even if you tried hard. It seemed far more rational to buy a system with out a DVD-R in April, wait for DVD standards to take hold, and then buy a good one. None the less, the Gateway, I bought came with one DVD-R drive, one DVD-R worth approximately $10.00, and lots of capture , editing video and writing DVD-R software. As it turns out, the software was of limited value, being either LE or extremely back level, but that is getting ahead of this sad story.

I, of course, had several June/July mini-DV tapes full of family events and a fairly light teaching load. So, now was the time to try to write that one DVD-R with the pile of software that was on hand. Because I had only one DVD-R, I wanted to get it right the first time. So, the plan became to use Adobe Premiere to capture and edit the multiple mini-DV tapes, then use Microsoft Movie Maker which is a simple video editor that ships with Windows Office XP Home to quickly generate clips and to trim clips to use as input into Visual Communicator?s highly regarded video customizing software. You have to be careful to request ?other? in save to movie in Microsoft Movie Maker; otherwise you are stuck with WMV format which is Microsoft?s preferred format which Adobe Premiere will not import. After importing back in Adobe Premiere, I wanted to use Premiere?s Cleaner, shipped as part of Adobe Premiere 6.0, to generate multiple outputs for Web. This part of the plan worked just fine. The next part of the plan was to use Adobe Premiere to merge, edit and write several final VHS tapes. This worked just fine and now several friends and relatives have enjoyed several family events.

Now here is where it becomes more interesting but not in a positive sense. The plan now called for generating the Mpeg-2 format, rather than any kind of AVI file with its multiple codec possibilities, for this is what DVDs want. The problem was that

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