Need someone with better knowledge than me to chime in...... but, you have a few options for your 2 hour production.

1) Reduce bit rate which reduces file size, which reduces quality
2) Keep bit rate and file size and file quality and bang on to 2 DVDs
3) Cut down the length of your production so it fits

Your render templates seem logical for the formats you are producing. I have no idea why it is taking so long. Again I hope someone can help you here. Seems like the computer is struggling with something..... even an old slow machine shouldn't take this long for "just HD"

Google and download free "Mark's Bitrate Calculator" and calculate the bitrate to use when rendering.

Echoing what DonaldT said. File size is determined pretty much solely by length and bitrate.

Super handy and quick calculation is to divide 600 by the length in minutes to get total bitrate. If your video is 120 minutes long then you have to encode with a combined average bitrate of 5mbps or less. You need to subtract the audio size from that figure, so if you use 192Kbps AC3 then you would need to use 4.8~ish Mbps for the video. If you have a substantial amount of menues then this will reduce the available space as well.

It doesn't matter if your source is HD or SD or anything else. It's just the size of the DVD media that limits you.

Now, the DVD file doesn't have to be the only output. Render at 5Mbps for the DVD MPEG2 files, and then render another version to MP4 at much higher bitrate and resolution to use for online.

Personally, i'd look at trying to cut down the length. It's difficult to imagine a funeral being two solid hours of material that must all be retained. It's also unlikely that anyone will want to sit through and watch all of that. Part of your task as an artist may include trimming the video down to eliminate some of the less interesting or empty sections. If you could cut out 24 minutes you'd be able to encode at 6Mbps instead of 4.8 and the quality would be quite substantially better.

Another option (unless you are already doing it) is to use a dual-layer DVD which holds about 8.5 GB of data.

wwaag

Download the VideoHelp bitrate calculator. Requires Java.

Since the funeral video likely has relatively low motion, you can easily get away with encoding at a lower bitrate.

[Tourist Information]

Does your camera shoot 1920x1080-24p? or 60i?

[/Tourist Information]

I can shoot at 24p or 60I

I agree with what you're saying, and take it to heart about the editing. I do as much as I can, some people want it all, and when the customer pays....

That being said, I've downloaded teh calculator and it's recommending 4,785 bit rate. Im going to try that and hope the quality wont suffer too much.

Not sure what happened...
Was rendering with Vegasaur but it kept crashing/ So I went directly from Vegas and let it stew over night. It now seems stuck at 74% with oo.oo.oo time left after running for 11.26 hours.

'DVD Shrink' is a much faster alternative to re-rendering the entire project in Vegas and quality loss 'seems' about the same.
OTOH, many have found the dual-layer (DVD-9) discs unreliable... the media itself and end-user playback issues. If you do decide to go that route, the Verbatim discs are preferred (least problematic).

I have a disc duplicator and I don't think it will do dual layer

Quick Update:
I rendered again using the DVD A template and customizing it to a bit-rate of 4,100. That brought it down about a gig. Enough space to squeeze in with no noticeable loss in quality that I can see. Thank you.

Good for you! As John pointed out, this material is probably quite low motion so that it lends itself to lower bitrate encoding. You would notice a huge difference if this had been a soccer game or a swim meet.

I've been able to fit over 4 hours on a single DVD when the event was a talking-heads play with almost zero movement. I encoded 2-pass with max 8.5Mbps, average 2.2Mbps, and minimum 1Mbps. The few times that the cast moved around the encoder was able to "borrow" the bits it needed to preserve quality during the action.. Had it been a musical with dancing i probably would have split the same length over 3 discs.