Premiere Elements encounters error during burning process

[JohnnyO]

I have encountered a problem, and I think there is a pattern to it.
When I burned my 1st DVD with PRE7, During the media encoding procedd, I got an Error stating that Premiere Elements has encountered and error and needs to close.

I thought there might be an issue with something in my video, so I restarted PRE7, and loaded my project. I then rendered the timeline to see if that would fail, and show me where the error was. When I did this the rendering completed without error. I then tried to burn again and it completed without an issue. I didn't give it a second thought.

My second PRE7 DVD had no issues with the burning process, but I did render the timeline before starting the burning process.

Today, I had about 25 minutes of un-edited DV-AVI on my timeline, and I wanted to burn a quick DVD for a friend. I made a menu with chapters, but I did not render the timeline, to save time. The DVD burning process encountered an error and the program closed. I rebooted my PC and, re-started PRE7 and loaded my project. Then I tried to burn again and it failed the same way in the exact same spot (93% into the process while encoding the media).

I was perplexed because it should not have any issued with plain old DV-AVI which was captured with PRE7 from my miniDV .

I then rendered the timeline to see if that would give an error, and it did not. So I started the burning process one more time, and it completed successfully.

So to conclude, it seems that the burning process consistently fails when I do not render the timeline first. I wil be watching this behavior on my future DVDs.

[Chuck Engels]

Johnny, I ran into a similar problem recently, and at 93% too.
I thought it must be an oversize still image so I tried exporting an AVI and that worked.
I did not render the timeline at all during the process, added the AVI to a new project and burned the DVD without any problems.
This is very interesting, but it sounds like there is a definite solution at least

[RJ Johnston]

It may be months before you finally figure out what is causing it. For me, I haven't run into the problem, and I know some of what I burned included two DVD's where I never rendered the timeline. They were over an hour long MPEG-2 movies.

[JohnnyO]

If anything, if someone runs into this problem we can at leat suggest to render the timeline to see if that helps.

[JohnnyO]

By the way, here is a piece of data which may mean something, or may not mean anything at all.
During the last successful burning run, I was at my computer when the encoding process reached 93%. I was getting a little worried because it was at 93% for a real long time. It eventually went to creating the disk successfully without the encoding getting beyond 93%. Now it obviously did get to 100%, but the status bar never indicated it.
I will need to look at that further.

[JohnnyO]

Johnny, I ran into a similar problem recently, and at 93% too.
I thought it must be an oversize still image so I tried exporting an AVI and that worked.
I did not render the timeline at all during the process, added the AVI to a new project and burned the DVD without any problems.

My project consisted of about 10 DV-AVIs. I justt another solution would have been to export to DV-AVI and create the DVD with the single-DV-AVI. Both these methods would take arouhnd the same time.

[Ronnie]

I have not burned very many DVDs since upgrading to Ver. 7, but I have had some problems burning drirectly to a disc. I did not take the time to collect the details. My work around was to write to a folder then use different software to burn the disc. My last project gave me an error when trying to burn to a disc. I know I did not render before burning. It was a mixture of DV-AVI and VOB files. The project is still loaded, so I will give it a try tonight to see at what point it aborts the burn and if rendering first makes a difference. I would like to find a better work around than writing to a folder.

[Ronnie]

I had to leave the house before it finished, but when I returned home, it had finished, apperantly without error.

[dsttexas]

I have a large project (just over an hour) with DVD menus. All but a couple last minute edits had been rendered first. Burn to disk stopped at 58%. I rebooted and reloaded, and rendered the whole movie without a problem. Burn to disk failed at the same 58%. Bummer. This type burn problem has happened on several previous projects.

I researched a number of photos around 50-65% of the timeline, sizes were 1000 x 750, 763 x 600, 750 x 1000, 750 x 1031, and 1000 x 1333. I didn't think any of these would cause a failure. In fact, all my photos were in those size ranges.

So I then created a dv-avi file of the movie, successfully. It played nicely in Windows Media Player and DivX Plus Player, but RealPlayer, Quicktime and Nero Showtime players all showed washed out videos(??). Of course, none of them had my nice DVD Menu's which makes it a bit of a problem for any individual scene starts (14 of them).

Then I opened a new project and loaded that dv-avi file on the timeline, then did a burn to disk just to check it out. It worked and played fine.

Then I used that project to re-add my scene markers and DVD Menus, and did a final burn to disk. Success!

From now on, my process will always be to create a final dv-avi file when all editing is done except for the DVD Title Menus, then load it back in a new project and do the menus before attempting any burning processes.

Don

[John 'twosheds' McDonald]

Sometimes that problem is caused by a tiny gap between adjacent clips on the timeline.

[dsttexas]

John (and others),

Do you know of any way to find such tiny gaps that break the burning process? How did you discover it, John?

A couple times I somehow ended up with noticeable empty space between clips, and trying to right click the gap to delete and close gap did not work as it was grayed out. Sometimes I would have to drag the clips back (1 at time!), or go back to a previous auto-save that was good.

Don

[Dave McElderry]

The easiest way that I've found is to zoom in on the timeline to the maximum zoom. Then use the Page Down and Page Up key to jump to each break point, looking for gaps at each point. If you have many tracks this can get to be a bit tedious because you'll need to look at each track as you go.