Re: Premiere Pro output question

To get the best results, you should start a project in Premiere Pro that uses the 1280x800 settings. If you've already started working at a different resolution project, you can import that project into the new one. (You can't change a project's resolution once it's started, which is why you need to create a new one to use different settings.) Not using the native resolution of your LCD will result in one of three things:

1. Stretching, which will distort your images and look bad.
2. Scaling, which will expand your images. It could possibly create some artifacting but probably won't be bad.
3. Cropping, which will create black space around the outside of the slide show.

Whether or not you burn the DVD with Premiere Pro depends on what you want to do with the disc. Premiere Pro 2.0 allows you to create some limited menus, but without a lot of customization. Premiere Pro 1.x only allows you to create a disc without menus (playback begins when you start the disc). A DVD authoring program, like Adobe Encore DVD, lets you create custom menus and do a lot more with the disc.

If you do use an authoring program, you would export from Premiere Pro as an MPEG-2 or AVI file. The video data on a DVD is in the MPEG-2 format, but it is inside a special file wrapper (a .VOB file). Additionally, the MPEG-2 format has to meet certain specifications. Premiere Pro has presets for all of this and will create a DVD compatible MPEG-2 file for you. Most authoring programs can take file formats other than MPEG-2 and convert them for you, but AVI is the recommended format if this is the case- WMV is highly compressed and could result in a loss of quality.

(.DVD is not a file format used by DVD video discs.)