DVD files very small

ciconia wrote on 1/18/2005, 3:28 AM
Hi, everybody,

after reading through this great forum for a couple of weeks I have decided to buy Sony Vegas Movie Studio. I bought the program to do minor corrections at films which already were edited, for adding titles, and for burning DVDs. After working over several years with other NLEs (e.g. Final Cut on a Mac), I am so impressed by Movie Studio that I perhaps will upgrade to Vegas 5 to use it as my main editing program.

My first question to this forum is about the size of the file after exporting to MPEG for a DVD:

Some months ago I had edited a 20 minute film in Final Cut and had made a DVD through Final Cut. I also had saved the completed film back to DV. Now I captured the entire film from the DV tape with Movie Studio, did some small editing jobs (film length remained the same), mainly at the video track, and added two tiny events to the sound track. I rendered and burned a DVD from Movie Studio. Everything worked perfect, the image quality of the DVD burned from Movie Studio was perhaps even a bit better than that of the DVD burned from FC. I was, however, surprised, when I compared file sizes among the 2 DVDs. The files created by Movie Studio were much smaller than those created by Final Cut (1.4 GB vs. 1.1 GB).

What does the Movie Studio "Burn to DVD"-Template do to the film? Is there any additional compression involved? Both should have been encoded to MPEG2.

I look forward to your replies. Sorry for my limited English, I hope I made clear what I want to ask.

Thanks in advance
Holger

Comments

IanG wrote on 1/18/2005, 4:39 AM
>Both should have been encoded to MPEG2.

They were, but the MPEG standard allows enough flexibility to account for the differences you're seeing. For instance, you can use variable bit rates (VBR) in the encoding so that scenes where there's not much action don't use as much space. The maximum and minimum bitrates can be defined, but those values might be different between FC and MS - you could render some different video and find that MS now produces a larger file.

Another possibility is that you're using different audio formats. Depending on whether you're working with NTSC or PAL there are options there, too.

Ian G.