Mastering DVDs

Step 4: Getting Ready to Burn

If your disc will consist entirely of movies and graphics that you can put into the Premiere Elements Timeline, you may burn your DVD directly from the program. But our sample project using Premiere Elements has additional files--the soccer team's roster and league certificate that we set aside earlier in a special folder--so we have to render the project to our hard drive (sometimes called making a disk image) by using the Burn DVD command and choosing Folder next to the 'Burn to' label. After making an image of our project, we can drag and drop it to a DVD, along with any other files or folders, using a basic burning program; most DVD drives include one.

Make sure that the combination of bonus material and DVD files you want to save to disc doesn't exceed 4.37GB, the storage capacity available on a standard DVD. To determine the total size of the folder in which you've saved your bonus material, right-click the folder and select Properties. Before rendering your project, use Premiere Elements' 'Burn DVD' command (in the DVD Layout window) to check the project's size, and choose a quality level that will fit on your disc. You may not be able to render the project at the software's highest quality setting and still fit it and your bonus material on a single disc. Finally, to make sure that your DVD will work in any digital video player, be sure to burn it as a DVD-R disc.

To save yourself some time, whether you are using Premiere Elements or a DVD-burning program to make your final disc, take advantage of Premiere Elements' preview feature. You can access this by clicking the DVD icon on the taskbar. Make sure that you're happy with the way the finished disc looks before you start the rendering process.

Both methods of rendering and burning are surprisingly slow. The PC I used (a 2.6-GHz Pentium 4 system carrying 1GB of RAM) took nearly 2 hours to burn a half-hour video. Premiere Elements' manual suggests burning to disc overnight. A tip: Before you get to the burning stage, you can prerender video segments by pressing the Enter key--say, when you take a break to raid the refrigerator. It's also a wise idea to save your work, reboot your system, and reload Premiere Elements before beginning the process of burning the DVD, to minimize the likelihood of a crash.

Once you get the hang of Premiere Elements--or any other well-made DVD authoring program--you'll be delighted at how easily you can produce professional-looking, easy-to-play DVDs.