Thread: Can't Create DVD with Premiere Elements - Help!!

Hi everyone -
I'm new to the forum and came here for some help because I am unable to successfully burn a DVD of a Premiere Elements 1.0 project that I have just completed.
I'm trying to resolve this as soon as possible, as I am intending to use this DVD as a Christmas present to some friends that I recently took a trip with. The project itself looks just the way I want it to when I run the finished film (approx 15 minutes) within the program itself prior to buring - and I have it just the way I want it to look as far as editing, audio, transitions, and DVD menu.
As soon as I try to burn it, though, the problem begins. At first it looks like it's starting up normally, and I know that this can be a slow process. I have a pretty recent, up to date PC, which I use frequently to burn DVDs in other applications - so I know my burner works and that I have the power to do it - yet when I come back to look at it after 3 or 4 hours, it will say that I still have about 2.5 hours to go, and it seems to be frozen at that point. No other information at all - yet, it seems frozen at this point until I shut down and try again. I have tried this twice already, with the same results.
Again, when I test it out prior to the burn, it runs beautifully - clear with full capability on all of the scene selections in the menu. So why won't it burn??
If anyone has any suggestions or work-arounds, I would appreciate it very much - there's not much time left between now and Christmas, and every night just seems to be tying up my PC for hours with no results. The project was fully rendered while I was doing all the editing.
Thanks in advance for any help offered....
Steve

One work around would be to create an image of the DVD, then burn this with another a seperate burning application such as Nero (or the one that came with your burner).

Steve,

Let's talk capture file formats. What format did you set your capture file to in the settings? AVI, Mpeg, something else? Did you capture using Firewire and not USB? Now that you have your finished movie on the timeline what format is it in? Did you check the export settings to make sure they are set to Mpeg2 and not something else? I was going to ask about bitrates but I can't remember off hand whether you use CBR or VBR (maybe someone else could pick up on that point) and finally are you using a laptop or desktop pc and what spec is it? You shouldn't have to wait 3 to 4 hours for a 15 min movie... more like one to one and a half times the duration of your movie.

Nikosony & Marc,
Thanks for your responses. In answer to your question, Nikosony, first let me explain what I was trying to do - it was basically supposed to be a slide show of pictures of my recent trip to Italy (approx 250 JPG files, which would be on for about 2 seconds before cross fading into the next), having a soundtrack made up of MP3 files (approximately 6 of these) and including 5 short WMV video files (I originally had them as AVI files, but Premiere Elements would not accept them for some reason due to their audio tracks, so I converted them to WMV's, which worked).
Since I have both Photoshop Elements 3.0 and Premiere Elements 1.0, I originally tried to create the slide show on Photoshop, however it would not include the video files into the slide show, and I wanted to keep them. That's why I decided to try using Premiere Elements. Once I got into it, I enjoyed the editing, created a bunch of titles to use as a header for each new city in the show, and even decided to create a DVD menu with screen selections (15 in total). Once I chose the menu template, I manually set the DVD scene markers. When I went to preview the DVD before burning it, I got a popup message that said that some of my menu items were overlapping (I checked and the markers were set up in chronological order and nothing appeared to be overlapping. Even so, I cleared all the scene markers, and put them in manaully again... same popup, which I did not understand... however, I said OK, and went to test the preview, and all of the scene selectors on the menu worked perfectly.
When I went to burn the DVD, however, I got the problem I originally reported, twice in a row. That is when I posted this message yesterday.
Last night, I went home and figured I would try to burn the DVD without the DVD menu, so I backed up the project (.prel) file and then removed the menu and all the markers. I also did not check the option of burning to full disk size this time, but instead used the slidebar on the burn menu to set it to about 95% of capacity). I then burned it again, and thankfully, it worked!!!! (Still took at least 2 hrs, and I have a pretty new, powerful PC, with plenty of memory and hard drive space.)
I'm not sure what made it work, though I suspect that the scene markers were the problem, for some reason - I wish I understood why, so I could correct this. The DVD plays beautifully, however - so I am grateful for that - only that unfortunatelythere is no menu, which would have really been a nice touch to go directly to the city that the person wanted to see.

Marc, you mentioned the possible workaround of burning the image of the DVD first (I guess you mean to the hard drive instead of to disk?) and then using another program to burn to a disk. I did try to burn the image initially to my hard drive (I think I chose an MPGE2? file). I was able to create this file, but it also did not include the menus, and when I went to look at it on my Windows Media player, the picture was too small.

Can anyone think of any way that I still might be able to capture the menu to DVD, or are you aware of any problems like this? If not, thanks very much for your advice and I am glad to at least have some kind of DVD that I can send to my friends for Christmas.
Happy Holidays.
Steve

The pop up overlapping error message you are getting is refering to the text of the scenes overlapping the text of the other scene, I think you will find, if you if you click on scenes in the DVD menu in preview it will show you the text overlapping the next, you could try cutting the wording down or choose a scene menu where the thumbnails are above one another and the text is out to the side,.
I hope I am making myself clear.