Fit to DVD

BikerJim wrote on 6/2/2010, 3:02 AM
Hi,

I am a bit confused about creaeting a movie suitable for burning to a DVD, with Vegas Movie Studio Platinum.

I have two theatre shows shot in PAL widescreen mpg, I have created some simple titles and created a single mpg file from the two, which is 4.52Gb,and I thought that would fit on a DVD, but when I import that into DVDArchitect it tells me that it wont fit.

I have tried various settings, but it seems that some critical options are crippled, which makes it hard/impossible to render a movie so that it fits to a standard DVD.

For example, if you use the recommended mpeg 2 codec together with DVD Architect profile, the custom button is greyed out so you can't alter the settings. This creates a movie file of 5.2Gb, too big to burn. I would have thought that a preset that prevents you from changing the settings would automatically do that?

The only way toadjust the render settings is to choose MPEG1, but I don't know if this is any good for DVD as I haven't tried to burn it because the aspect ratio breaks (I shoot in widescreen, it renders as non-widescreen, no matter what I set as the project settings; it says PAL DV Widescreen everywhere there is an option.

How can I get around this problem? Is MPEG1 ok for DVD? Why does it ignore the widescreen settings unless its set to MPEG2?

I have read the forums and found a calculator which tells you which settings to use, but I can't enter them if I choose MPEG2, I have found AVsynth, which somehow could take the final mpg and then resample it, but its far from easy to use, and frankly I feel like I already have a video rendering software which should enable me to do that, but perhaps I dont?

The 'Fit to DVD' button does nothing at all apart from invoking an error message telling me that the file is too big to fit on a DVD, remove some media. Yes, I know, that is why I clicked the button, and no, I cant remove any media.

Anyone who can shed some light on this would be appreciated.

Cheers
Jim

Comments

Chienworks wrote on 6/2/2010, 4:14 AM
MPEG1 is definitely a bad choice. If you do that you'll get a substandard render which will then have to be reencoded into MPEG2 anyway, since all DVDs are MPEG2. Reencoding a lossy format to a lossy format loses a lot of quality.

The limit that will fit is closer to 4.28GB. Vegas & Windows use 1.0737 billion bytes per GB, while the blank DVD manufacturers use 1.00000 billion bytes. That means when they claim 4.7GB the disc actually only holds 4.37GB, and then you need some space for the file structure and various other requirements.

Yes, sadly the custom button isn't available in Vegas Studio. That's one of the reasons they charge more for the Pro version. However, DVD Architect does have the fit-to-disc option. It doesn't work well if you feed it an MPEG file, and you don't want to do that anyway because it will involve rerendering MPEG to MPEG. Render a DV .avi file from Vegas, then feed this into DVDA and use the fit-to-disc option. DVDA will then encode an MPEG2 version with the correct bitrate to just fill the disc.
HaroldC wrote on 6/2/2010, 1:20 PM
This topic get covered fairly regularly and there should be a number of threads on it. If you have already rendered to mpeg2 using VMS Platinum go ahead and prepare the dvd in Architect but don't burn. Then run it through dvdshrink or a similar program to reduce it down to where you can burn it onto a dvd. I do this quite a bit but I've never constructed a PAL dvd. You should make sure dvdshrink or whatever program you use works for PAL. This will save time in re-rendering the video using Architect.
BikerJim wrote on 6/3/2010, 7:01 AM
I realise this has probably come up before, but nothing was returned on any of my search terms, in this forums search anyway.

It has probably come up a lot because its pretty surprising that such basic functionality has been removed? And software companies wonder why people pirate sofware? Amazing.

My camera takes mpg-2 already, is it really necessary to create an AVI and then save it back as an mpg2 again?? If this functionality hadnt been removed it would be possible to do a straight recompress from mpg to mpg. Weird stuff indeed.

Anyway, thanks for the tips, I will go out and install yet another piece of software just to achieve what I thought I was achieving buy buying a sofware suite with 'DVD Architect' as the title. Sony, I am afraid you suck.

Its not a bad piece of software but this kind of thing really p&*ses me off. If they had been up front about crippling their software like this I would never have bought it. It simply does not do what it says it can on the tin.

Thanks,
Jim