Mike,

I absolutely love Adobe Premiere. I used AVID a bit in college as I was a Radio-TV-Film major and of course AVID is the best, but Adobe Premiere is awesome for home use. Currently, I am only burning to CDs since I am still building up the guts/funds to buy a new computer with a DVD+R drive. I have only used the CDs to view on my computer or other family members' computers. My DVD player was an earlier model and will not play anything but DVDs and a few audio CD-Rs. I am not sure how much a CD will hold...never filled one....I only use CD-Rs not RWs so when I burn.....that's it....no more on that disc and I usually only burn one or two videos at a time. But I can tell you that I have burned about 10 minutes or video w/ audio and additional music tracks and I THINK it only took a little over half the space of the disc. I may be wrong, but that is my memory of it. So I would guess that it would hold between 15 and 20 minutes. Surely not enough for a movie, but plenty for an edited home video. I try to keep all my videos under about 6 minutes, as they are being sent to relatives and a good rule of thumb is to keep them short and sweet so you don't bore the audience. I end up cutting about 3/4 of what I shoot to make the final cut....sorry, that is not what you are asking though.

I encode them as MPEG files I believe. The software has the capabilities of being able to control the compression rate so that you can make the files smaller (lower quality) or larger (better quality). I thry to minimize compression so it looks good when wathing on the computer. The newer version of Adobe has MPEG2 capabilties, but I have not had a chance to play with the new version yet. To be honest, I don't know if you even would use MPEG2 for burning to a CD...I kind of think that is for DVD only.....but I may be wrong.

Tripdaddy
Father of Sam, Rob, & Trey