AVI 4 gig max to DVD

GPayton wrote on 5/3/2005, 10:55 AM

I am working with my first Vegas project (V 5.0d). I shot the original on DV. Edited the project in Vegas (total time 105 minutes). I read where I should stick to DV formats for projects shot on DV, so I rendered the project as AVI (NTCS DV).

I ended up with four rendered files, three of them 3.99 GB in size. I see where there is a 4 gig file size limit. DVD Architect recognizes each file as it's own DVD project.

Question: What do I need to do to fit this project on 1 DVD? If I render it as a non-DV format, will that kill the visual quality? How do Hollywood movies make it on a single DVD, while my barely over 1 hour footage will not?

Comments

Jsnkc wrote on 5/3/2005, 11:08 AM

For DVD you need to render the AVI-DV files to MPEG-2 and AC3 audio files. Use the DVD Architect templates within Vegas to do that. Then import the MPG and Ac3 files into DVD-A and burn away.

John_Cline wrote on 5/3/2005, 11:16 AM

DVD video discs use only MPEG2 video compression. You can't use DV format AVI files directly, they will have to be converted to MPEG2 at some point, either in Vegas or in DVD Architect.

You say that you ended up with 4 .AVI files, which indicates that you have written your final .AVI files to a hard drive partition which has been formatted using FAT32. You need to reformat the drive to NTFS and then you can render a single .AVI file of any size which you can then bring in to DVDA. DVDA will then determine the optimum MPEG2 bitrate to convert and compress your 105-minute AVI to fit it on a single DVD.

As you learn more about the DVD authoring process, you will probably want to render your MPEG2 files from Vegas where you have more control over the process. For example, being able to use 2-pass variable bitrate MPEG2 encoding to optimize the video quality of your DVD's or use AC3 audio encoding to allow you to use a higher bitrate for your video. The details and nuances of MPEG2 encoding and DVD authoring is a fairly complex subject, but here are a lot of tutorials about it on the Web.

John