The main movie is 1:15, prolly about 15 mins in the bonus material, outakes/deleted scenes in addition to a photo gallery.

As for DVD format, not sure. Just seems the only way to keep eveyrhing I've already done in tact without paying them to re-author the whole thing ... or something. Keep in mind at this stage I'm way outta my league. The only other way I could see of getting something that big there is with my external HD, but again, they dont use Ulead.

Hope I answered your questions, I'll be checking the board a lot tonight, so feel free to ask more and I'll answer as best as a novice can. =)

- Ray

ray@austin.rr.com

Did you use Main Concept to render the MPEG files? I've seen some people say they don't want to go below 7000 vbr, but I really can't tell any difference between Main Concept MPEG 2 at 6000 vbr and what I play from my DV tape. That should give you about an hour and a half, maybe not quite.

DVD-R should play on 100% of all players coming out in the last few months and on 70% of those before.

Instead of paying a duplicating house tons of money you could buy a Pioneer A05 for about $300 and burn 1 DVD every 15 minutes on the new 4X media. Or you could buy the new Sony which burns both DVD-R and DVD+R. There was a post here or in the Cow forum by somebody who had the Sony, had downloaded a patch and was able to burn 4X DVD-R with that.

So it all depends on how long your movie is. You should buy a burner, get some cheap but dependable media, then do some tests. Just burn 10 minutes at different rates, and see what your eyes tell you!

Oh, ok. I was thinking you were gonna say 2hrs or something.

1hr 15mins is easily done with very high quality on DVD. What you need to do is re-encode your project using a "modified" DVD template. Vegas uses a very high bitrate for it's DVD MPEG-2 encoding template. Visit this site:

http://www.vcdhelp.com/calc.htm

Enter the length of your movie in minutes (75), change to 1 disk and DVD, and set the audio to 384kb/s to be safe. This should give you a good idea of the bitrate you need to set your video at. (I would give you the bitrate, but I don't have the java plugin installed)

After you get the bitrate, open Vegas and your project. Then choose File>Render As, choose MPEG-2, DVD NTSC, then click Custom. At the bottom of the box you should see Video Bitrate (8,000,000 max, 4,200,000 average, 192,000 min). You need to change the Max to whatever number you got from the bitrate calc. I would think that 6,000,000 would be sufficient, but make sure it is slightly lower than the number the bitrate calc gave you b/c u don't want to re-encode again!

If mpg audio worked fine before, why worry now? It is not in the DVD NTSC spec. (you need either PCM or AC3). This opens another can of worms.

Let me know if you have any other questions, or I wasn't clear on something above.

Try Prassi PrimoDVD for duplication. It makes a disc image then you punch in how many copies and wait for the chime that tells you it is time to put in the next blank. Painless. The other posters are right in the time. I use the A03 because all the blanks I have (bought in bulk) are rated at just 2X. Guess same limitation would apply to the A04 or A05.

Peter

Great timing. I was just looking at how to do some testing like this for myself to calculate space on the dvd. I am waiting for Movie Factory2 in the mail, but my first try with the burner software MyDVD sure used a lot of space for something beyond the data file. So much to learn, so little brain power.

jthor, I got started burning DVDs just after 911. Nobody knew anything. I remember going into Best Buy, after researching the net, and asking about their Pioneer burner. "It's great for data, but you can't burn movies on it," I was confidently told by a salesman. He then explained that Best Buy's tech people had issued this proclamation. So I bought it and went home and started burning movies.

Anyways, everything I learned came from the net, from those who had ventured ahead of me. I downloaded a lot of tutorials before I had it all figured out. It should be a lot easier now.

As far as using a lot of data space beyond the file, DVD's have to be finalized. I don't know the technical details, but if you've say got only a 10 minute movie on a 4 gig DVD it finalizes the disk by burning way beyond your file.

If you have the latest version of myDVD it probably uses up a bit more space than normal because it's "Open format" . You can go back in & add files etc after you have finished burning.

I find the following formula serves well for working out bitrate

Add the amount of minutes of video together (including motion menus if they are in the project)

600/total minutes of video = AVERAGE bitrate for video & audio combined.

ie
600/90mins = 6.6Mbs

If you are using PCM (.wav) audio that will be about 1600kbs leaving AVERAGE bitrate of 5.0Mbs for video

If you were using .ac3 or MPEG audio at say 192kbs you could have AVERAGE vidoe rate of 6.4Mbs

That's AVERAGE video bitrate on a VBR encode. Your upper limit for difficult sections can be higher and your lower limit can be lower to help save space for the difficult sections.

Muttley:
It sounds like you're 90% of the way home. Like the folks on top have said, just re-encode your MPEG2 files for a slightly lower bitrate, use VBR, and frankly I wouldn't worry too much about MP2 audio. Burn a couple of disks, and try them out in lots of different players. My experience is that many older players will choke on DVD-Rs, period, while new players couldn't care less about the audio format.

I just finished a 100-minute project where I shaved the bitrates a little too close. A DVD-R holds 4.37GB, and I have 4.34GB of material. Turns out every one of the 30 Fujifilm DVD-R blanks burned perfectly.

DVD Workshop will do LPCM audio. I ran into the same problem where I would get analog audio from my Pioneer player but not optical until I forced DVD Workshop to do LPCM audio.

It is not obvious. You need to select "custom" format. Then check off LPCM audio and uncheck an option about rerendering..... I'm not looking at the screen so I don't remember the exact wording on that screen.

But, rest assured, that DVD Workshop will do LPCM audio - if you force it to do it.