DVD preparer

Cooldraft wrote on 7/16/2010, 5:55 AM

I have seen several DVD preparer scripts, but I want to render my 2 hour dance recital to mpg that will be great quality and fit on a dvd without having to re rencer in DVDA, right now the only way I see to do it is render to an AVI and let DVDA take care of fitting it to a disc.

Comments

rs170a wrote on 7/16/2010, 6:09 AM

Use a bitrate calculator to determine optimum settings.
http://www.johncline.com/bitcalc110.zip is my personal favourite as it's never let me down.
The only changes I make to it are to set the Safety Margin to 5% and the "1 kilobit = 1000 bits" option found in the Settings tab.
The final quality will only be as good as the source video.
A few months ago, I shot a stage play that ended up being 2 1/2 hr. long.
I thought it would have to be a 2-disc set but a test encode proved me wrong so it all went on a single disc.
It helped that the show was professionally lit and I had a 3 CCD camera with 1/2" chips.
For a 2 hr. show, use VBR settings as follows.
8,000,000 / 4,688,000 / 2,808,000
Due to the length and content, I;d do it as a 2-pass render.
These numbers assume AC-3 audio at the default setting of 192 k.
Stick to good name brand media (Taiyo-Yuden or Verbatim) and you shouldn't have any problems.
BTW, no matter what numbers it gives me, I never let the MAX setting go over 8,000,000 as it can cause problems with cheap blank media and players.

Mike

Cooldraft wrote on 7/20/2010, 11:35 AM

Mike, mind telling me what to choose? I assume MainConcept mpg2. But don't want to guess and screw up a 6 hour render. Also id the ac3 thing fixed where it sounded low (volume)

rs170a wrote on 7/20/2010, 11:52 AM

Assuming this is for a standard def DVD and not Blu-ray, MainConcept MPEG-2 is correct.
Use either DVD Architect NTSC video stream or DVD Architect NTSC Widescreen video stream as per your project settings.

For "the ac3 thing fixed", I think the following is what you're talking about.

Encode set to AC3;
Click on custom tab;
Dialog normalization: -31 dB;
Dynamic range compression: None;
On the first tab set diag. norm to "-31";
On the last tab marked preprocessing;
Set the Line Mode & RF mode profiles to "None";
Now save this as a preset.

Mike