Anyone familiar with how to author a DVD?

[Ballzo]

I just had a few questions about doing this. Mainly a question about space. I know there is a way to fit more than 2 hours on a standard dvd I just cannot figure out how to do it. Also what program is best for this and customizing your own menus? Any help I this will be greatly appretiated.

[deathie mouse]

The way you fit more than 2 hours of video programing on a DVD is by increasing the compression of the mpeg2 coding.

A single layer DVD (DVD-5) holds about 1 hour of normal video and audio at the maximum bitrate available (bitrate = amount of data that is transmited per second) at the minimum mpeg2 compression, and a double layer DVD (DVD-9) hold about 2 hours. If you want to cram more time than that you have to increase the mpeg2 compression to squeeze more into the disc (just like making a pic jpeg smaller in file size by increasing the jpeg compression)

For example if you have 4 hours of video and you wanted to put that into a DVD-9, you'd have to compress it roughly twice as much in encoding than the minimum best quality setting so the file size ended up being small enough to fit the disc. Since compression degrades quality, you'll have to decide how much more you can compress and still get acceptable results.

Hope this makes sense.

There's a lot of DVD Authoring and Video Encoding apps, me being a Mac user i'd recommend stuff like Apple's Studio Pro and Final Cut Pro but mm those might be a little pricey specially if you don't have a Mac

[bmadigan]

I am attempting to make DVDs of a play for the cast to have as souveneirs. I used a digital camera to record the show and am using Pinnacle Studio version 9 to format it.

My problem is that the play's runtime is 159 minutes. The 4.7GB DVD+R blanks I have claim they can store 120 minutes, but the Stidio software won't let me put more than an hour onto a disc. I'd really like to get this down to only two discs.

Am I doing something wrong? Or is it not possible to get 120 minutes of quality video on a 4.7GB disc, so why are they claiming you can?

Thanks for any help.

[deathie mouse]

As you can see from the merged thread answer to a similar question above, you can do this. You could even fit it all into one 4.7GB blank if you didn't mind the decrease in quality if you wanted to.

Your software would have to take your DV video encoded files (from your DVcam, unless you have an mpeg2 camera or something) and rencode them into mpeg2 video at the correct size. If you want to fit your 159m video into 1 DVD-5 you have to change the compression settings or final encoded size be less than 4.7GB, if you want it to fit into two DVD-5s youd have to split it and make each half less than 4.7GBs.

If you already only have a mpeg2 file and it's bigger than that, you'd have to rencode it (create a new one) at the correct compressed sizes.

The best way would be to convert/encode the original DV video stream into the correct mpeg2 video file sizes of course.

If your software doesn't let you do this you need to change software. But hopefully your Pinnacle/Stidio stuff does have the settings for this?

If your rencoded video is bigger than the DVD-R capacity i suppose that's why the DVD burning software is not letting you burn it into the discs?


Just so that you know, if you recorded into DV format in your camera, that's about like 5:1 compresion. Fitting 159m into 2 DVD-5s increases compresion to about 20:1, into one DVD-5 to about 40:1

Minimum compression on a DVD-5 (one hour of programming without extras) is about 15:1

If your software lets you preview the mpeg2 coded files you could try seeing if shrinking them into even a single DVD-5 was "acceptable quality" or not.

[bmadigan]

Thanks for the help. I finally found the settings to get all 149 minutes on one disc. It says it is only 40% of full qulaity, but it sure looked OK to my eyes.