DVD Quality slider

Premiere Elements 6 and 7 - I am trying to burn a DVD. According to the documentation there is supposed to be a Quality slider that appears when you uncheck the ''Fit Contents to available space'' checkbox. No such slider appears. It does not matter whether I am burning to a file or to a disc - no slider. The file is only 2 minutes. There is a Disc menu.



I had this same problem in PSE 6, but the quality was very bad (cross fade transitions very noisy, blocky looking moving footage). It looked like the invisible slider was set all the way down by default.



So I downloaded a Trial version of PSE 7, opened the same project - and there was a Quality slider. I burned a test DVD with the slider all the way up and it looked pretty good. So I bought PSE 7, installed it, ran another test - OK. Then I did a few edits, added some Ken Burns style pan and zoom moves and a title. Now again there is no Quality slider. It looks better than PSE 6 but not as good as it should. I have tried DVD-RW and DVD+R media, restarting PSE 7, changing presets, reloading the old project that worked before, rendering the timeline, no luck.



This feature really needs to work, as the only reason I bought this software is to make DVD slideshows. I have tried making an MPEG2 file and using other software to make the DVD from it, but it does not look good and takes hours for the other software to transcode it. Any help is appreciated.
DVD Quality slider
So when you click on Share, Disc there is no slider below Quality or is it greyed out? If it is greyed out deselect Fit Contents to Available Space. Make sure to select DVD as the disc format, there is no slider if you select Blu-ray.



One other thing... how long is your project for highest quality your project should be a maximum of an hour. You can get acceptable quality (subjective) with up to two hours, any longer and quality will be poor.



Also if you are making slideshows be sure to to scale your photos to 1000x750 before importing them... this is sufficient to allow some pan and zooming. PE7 does not scale photos well plus you will have fewer problems like PE7 running low on memory.
DVD Quality slider
Thanks for your fast reply Paul LS.



No, the slider is not greyed out. It is just gone, even with Fit Contents to available space deselected. I have selected DVD. The project is only 2 minutes.



I use JPG originals that are scaled to 1600 in the maximum direction by Picasa. This seems to work well even when I zoom in to 200%. My system is XP Pro with 2G of memory, core 2 Duo at 2.4 GHz.



The only thing I can think of is perhaps PRE 7 is using a system codec for the slider function and it got over-written by some other software. I use Individual Software Passages Express, Pinnacle TV, Magix, and Picasa. But there were no installs or updates between the time the PRE 7 Quality slider was working and when it disappeared. Just some edits and photo scanning. It is very odd that when you make an MPEG 2 file or a MOV you get pages of options, various audio quality settings, CBR vs VBR etc. but for DVD all you get is a Quality slider.

This may or may not be the issue, but Premiere Elements does some quirky things when you cram a photo file that huge into it.



Resize those JPEGs to no larger than 1000x750 pixels and you'll see increased performance all around as well as a lot fewer program quirks.



Don't worry about the decreased resolution. DVDs only use 720x480 pixels (non-square, the equivalent of 640x480) so even 1000x750 is plenty of resolution.

grisetti steve - I tried 800 max resolution, a new Instant Movie 4 minutes long. Still no quality slider.

UPDATE

I finally figured this out. Boy do I feel stupid.



Whenever I do serious editing I configure my second monitor as the Monitor window and drag up the bottom half of the main window so I can see more of the tracks. This covered up the Quality slider. It was there all along, just covered up by the bottom window.



Note to Adobe coders - it is traditional for a slider to appear at the right of any window that has inaccessible objects due to window resizing. I'll put this in a bug report.