DVD Capacity

[JshuFX]

well what are you doing exactly......making this dvd for storage/back up purposes?

or is this to be a movie dvd for a dvd player........?

[dell]

Hi JshuFX thank you for your response.



The captured footage will be viewed as a movie on a DVD player. I am in the process of adjusting the bit rates, to see if I can find a balance between quality and size.

Thanks

[Tagger]

those 120 minutes are all marketing. When encoding/transcoding to mpeg2 you have different levels of quality and offcourse the 120 minutes are calculated for the lowest settings. Most movies ('real' dvds) that you buy are well over 4.7 gig for 2 hours for the quality that you can see

[JshuFX]

ok.....so if this is a dvd movie you need dvd authoring software

you don't want to compress your .avi file at all actually you want to let the authoring/encoding software do that.

in fact you want to take an uncompressed .avi into a program such as adobe encore
and let encore transcode it....encore will compress it down to a size that can fit on a dvd.

i don't have any experience with a movie that long....so I can't really give you much advice! sorry!

[anobrin]

HiI
if you are on the MAC platform you have MANY solutions
the primary one being a free utility called 'FFMPEGX"
along with toast titanium version
7 or 8 ( $ 80 USD)

ffmpegx will take **any** video file
and compress it to a target media such as fit this to one 80 min cd or one
4.7 gig DVD.

But Toast does any even better trick
called "Fit to DVD" Compression

You can author your DVD with
the menus etc in DVD Studio pro
or the program of your liking and Export
to to a self contained formatted playable DVD disc image on the desktop.

it does not matter that this Disc image exceeds 4.7 gigs as toast will
compress it just enough during the recording process
to fit onto the 4.7 gig media and will warn you of how much quality you will lose and give you the option of leaving stuff out such as addition language tracks etc.

Forget Soreneon and those OLD lossy codecs
today the standard is becoming Mpeg4 as in apple's H264 codec

Using FFMEG X with apple H264 codec and Toast
I have successfully taken 6 gig movie file extracted from My legally owned DVD's like Starwars "Revenge of the sith"
and compressed them down to 400 MEG!!
mpeg4 files that will fit easily onto the 1 gig memory card for playback on my sons PSP® ( play station portable).

Video Compression has come a LONG LONG Way

[JshuFX]

does h.264 still have bugs with the gamma though?

[anobrin]

Hi,
H264 is a delivery format for small devices such as Ipod ,PSP etc
Obviously for consumer DVD's for home player you will be encoding to MPEG-2
packaged as Video-TS VOB files.
but as wa stated before you need a good DVD production program that will perform the final encode to mpeg2 for you
there are Many on OSX but im afraid i cant offer any advice for Windows

Sorry

[jussing]

You can also export an MPEG-2 from most editing programs, like Vegas Video.

If I were you I'd export exactly 30 seconds of your movie using different bandwidth settings. Then do the math, and see what compression settings will make the whole movie fit on the disk. And leave some megabytes for the DVD system files.

Cheers,
- Jonas

[beaker]

does h.264 still have bugs with the gamma though?It's not a bug, it's a feature. Embedding gamma is part of the spec because it is made as a delivery format for televisions.

It would be nice if we could turn it off though because while everyones tv is configured relatively the same, peoples computers are not.

[beaker]

ok.....so if this is a dvd movie you need dvd authoring software

you don't want to compress your .avi file at all actually you want to let the authoring/encoding software do that.I disagree. The authoring software is a horrible place to compress a movie. Most give you relatively little controll over the compression of the final movie and half the time it looks like shit when it is finished with it. I always compress the movie in a separate package and then use it in the authoring software.

Quick correction, if you don't want to have to think about settings and crap and only care that it is going to fit on the dvd, then go ahead and use the authoring software.

[anobrin]

Good points ... both

I use Apple's FCP "Compressor"
it is a stand alone batch compression utility app with a huge variety of
MPEG -2 presets as well as unlimited level of user define input.
then I take the mpeg2 media into DVD studio pro for authoring
but its for people in pro environments who actually understand what all those parameters mean.

But for someone who just wants to get his footage onto DVD generally the
authoring or even the burning software ,like toast titanium, will suffice.

[dell]

Just like to say thanks to everyone who contributed to this thread, cheers.



I created a few tests using various parameters/settings and have taken on board all the advice given on this thread. I should have mention that I'm using Premiere Pro 2 and Encore. Although I have not compressed anything in Encore, as I wanted control over the settings.



I should have mentioned the raw footage was shot using DV footage, which made the job of compressing much harder, as the quality sucks big time.



I did get some good results using various settings 2 passes etc "but the files were massive".

I've also offered my client the option of having the movie burned on 2 DVDs, thus to gain the best quality possible.


If you have any other tips & tricks to add, please feel free

[beaker]

What program are you compressing the mpeg 2 files in? If it's premiere, then get something else. Premiere maybe great at editing, but it sucks at compression.

[dell]

Thanks beaker

Yes, I'm using Premiere Pro and your right its sucks big time.

Could you please recommend a different solution?. Like I said with it being DV footage, I'll need something really good. I would like to compress around 2 hours footage max on a DVD disk, but still retain good quality

Thank you in adv

[RonDog]

altho i dont have much experience in this, cleanerXL works pretty sweet.
check it out if u can.

[dell]

Thanks RonDog

Has anyone had any experience using Cleaner XL, seems very expensive

£516.99 inc VAT

[beaker]

Here is a good list of some more inexpensive solutions:
http://www.videohelp.com/tools/sections/video-encoders-mpg-dvd

I'm all mac now for my video but back when I did use windows it was either TMPEnc or Cinemacraft encoder. Also there is also Sorenson Squeeze which I use on the mac, but it is around $400.

[anobrin]

just a side note to beaker...
have you tried FFmpegX???
it a great shareware app for video conversion on OSX

[beaker]

I've tried it a few times, it's cool when I'm going to something like xvid. Never used it for mpeg 2 because I always had a nice pro solution like Squeeze(to web) and Compressor(to dvd).

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