DVD's over 2 hours

hairbug wrote on 10/26/2004, 1:31 PM
1st time poster here. I purchased the Vegas DVD Production Suite. My goal is to film music concerts at festivals and such. Usually weekend events. I record the audio into my computer. My problem is that I often want to render a 3-4 hour project. I then bought a sony DRU-700 DL burner thinking that I could just burn twice as much on 1 disk. When I tried to render the project, vegas doesn't let me render over a 2 hour project. Any suggestions?
Jeff

Comments

ScottW wrote on 10/26/2004, 1:51 PM
DVD Architect doesn't support DL burning at this point. In theory you should be able to still prepare the project in DVDA and then burn with Nero - though I don't think we've seen reports from anyone that has actually done all this yet (parts, but not all).

As for Vegas, it shouldn't care how long the rendered project will be.

--Scott
hairbug wrote on 10/26/2004, 1:54 PM
What is DVDA and are you saying that Vegas will let me burn to an image and then use Nero to burn the disk?
ScottW wrote on 10/26/2004, 1:59 PM
DVDA = DVD Architect. Vegas does not know how to author and burn a DVD, it's strictly an NLE. However, Vegas should let you render MPEG-2 files that exceed 4.37GB in size; in theory you could then use something like Nero to burn the DL DVD (Nero claims they can do this).

So the work flow would be:

1) Render from Vegas as MPEG-2 and AC3 (for audio)
2) Build project with DVDA, but don't burn, just build
3) Use Nero to take the files in the VIDEO_TS folder that DVDA created and burn those files to the DL DVD+R (alternatively, Nero does have some primitive authoring capabilities as well).
hairbug wrote on 10/26/2004, 2:24 PM
Thanks for the information. I will try this and post whether it works or not(I saw previous posts that offer this tip but no one committed to saying they actually did it)

Thanks
ScottW wrote on 10/26/2004, 2:31 PM
Make sure you get the right option in Nero to burn these files. Offhand I don't remember what it is, but when you're at the right place in NERO you'll have a screen with the VIDEO_TS and AUDIO_TS dirctories showing and you drag your VOB and IFO files into those directories - then you initiate the burn.

Also, there should be an burn option in Nero to burn with a DVD-ROM booktype (I think the Sony drive you have supports this). This will give you the best compatability since many players don't recognize the DL+R booktype.
TheHappyFriar wrote on 10/26/2004, 6:46 PM
I thought he had the $100 Screenblast replacement?

Anyway, it doesn't matter how LONG a video is, just the SIZE. Example: I put a 3 hour video onto a DVD no problem. I just used a bit-rate calculator (available at www.vcdhelp.com) to figure out the bitrate& rendered to that.

Then I make templates for the time persion (ie I have a 1 hour template that renders out at ~8mbs, a 2 hour one that renders at 4mbs).
riredale wrote on 10/26/2004, 7:49 PM
By the way, I've always been kind of "put off" by all the knobs and levers inside the industrial-strength Nero interface. I switched to the easy-as-pie "Nero Express" interface and have had excellent results doing the regular single-layer burns. I didn't even know that Nero did dual-layer; my guess is you'll need the complex interface to do it.

Bitrate calculation is very, very simple: 600/(minutes of video)=average combined bitrate. So for 2 hours, you get 600/120=5Mb/sec bitrate.

Since AC-3 audio needs 0.2Mb/sec, that leaves you with 4.8Mb/sec as your average bitrate to use in your MPEG2 encoder. I'd set average at 4.8, max at 9, min at 0.

All these numbers are assuming a single-layer (4.37GB) DVD. If you go dual-layer, you can let 'er rip.