Creating an AVCHD DVD with Nero Vision 5 and Premiere Pro

Question

This seems to work pretty well as a workflow (using AVCHD clips from a Panasonic SD5):-
Get your AVCHD clips onto your hard drive using the camcorder's software.
Run Nero 8 "StartSmart", choose "Author Edit and Capture Video"
Choose "Make Movie"
Using the "Browse For Media" button, navigate to where your AVCHD clips are and select.
When they are in the media file list, drag them to the Nero Vision timeline.
Click on the "Export" button and choose "Export Video to File"
Choose format "MPEG-2" and profile "HDV HD2 (1080i)"
Specify filename for output and click on "Export".
Run Premiere Pro and choose "New Project" and "Adobe HDV"
Choose HDV 1080i 25 (Sony 50i)
Edit as normal. On my quad core (Q9300) PC it's easily possible to use 3 video tracks at once and preview full screen smoothly, or add effects etc - a much better experience that using AVCHD with the costly Mainconcept plugin IMHO.
When done, choose File > Export > Adobe Media Encoder
Choose format MPEG2, Range "Entire Sequence" and Preset "HDV 1080i 25"
In the Video tab, Basic Video Settings area, you might care to up the quality to 5.0
Click OK and supply output filename.
Repeat the earlier stuff relating to Nero Vision but this time you want to select the file you've just output from PPro.
When you click "Next" once your file is on the Nero Vision timeline, choose "Make DVD with Edited Movie" > "AVCHD"
In the next screen choose "Create Chapters"
Well, follow your nose from there to create the chapters, then choose the menu and customise it, and burn to normal DVD in AVCHD quality.
What you end up with is an AVCHD DVD which will play on a Playstation 3 and probably on a Blu Ray player (I haven't got the latter to test). The finished quality is very close to the original quality - on the test material I've just been trying (playing back on a 42" full HD Bravia) I had to play repeatedly alternating original and edited footage to spot any differences - such that could be seen were pretty subtle.
While there are cheaper conversion programs to get AVCHD into PPro, I don't think any of them take the finished edit and do the AVCHD DVD creation and layout part like Nero does.
Hope that helps a new AVCHD user wanting to stick with PPro. If an experienced PPro user can see an obvious technical fault in what I'm doing I'd be glad to stand corrected.

Answer 1

Mick,
I got a simple project with a Play all and Scene select menu and then a scene menu. There was about 15 minutes of video, but it only seemed to cover about half the disk.
Encore seems tempermental, so I had to be very careful not to change any of the assets, etc.
I never could get Encore CS3 to recognize regular disks, and that's why I went to ImgBurn (burning either Bluray image or folder).
I tried Nero at first, and it seemed like a long process to get it to burn a UDF 2.5 format, but IMGBurn does that automatically.
This summarizes my experience, for what that's worth, with this.
http://www.wrigleyvideo.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=29665
Also, apparently,Sony will include this capability in DVD Architect Pro http://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/vegaspro/bluray.
Finally, some work by others is being done to attempt to burn the BluRay project to a dual layer SD DVD which might double the capacity, but I haven't heard if that has been successful.
Let me know what you think.
JOhn