Re: Premiere Pro not encoding transitions!

What settings are you using? There's no reason why 5 mins should be over a gig if it's compressed. If you're in CS4 check the settings before you send to media encoder (you can also change them once you're there) in particular the bit rate. A rough rule of thumb (at 25fps anyway) is width * height / 90 to give you a decent quality file - this is a subjective thing but seems to work. eg for a 720 x 576 project you get 720 * 576 / 90 = 4600 kbps. For the first part of your question - how are you applying transitions? I haven't had that happen before but it can be temperamental... if you're applying a cross dissolve effect for example have you tried setting opacity keyframes instead to fade from one track to the other?

Cheers

Nick