help! bloated renders

Dan_B wrote on 8/10/2007, 8:10 PM
Hello,
I've been contracted by a small city to convert their VHS tape collection to DVD. These tapes run anywhere from 6 minutes to almost 2 hours. I captured all in the MPEG-2 format. Now I'm trying to mix / match them to fill up a 2 hour DVD. However when I import the files into DVDA, 2 hours of video runs over 5gb. So I'm trying to re-render all into AVI files which will allow file compression by DVDA. But... my 2 hours of MPEG-2 video are rendering out to over 200gb as an AVI file. Something is off-level here and my thought processes aren't leading me in the right direction.

Any help, ideas, would be greatly apprecited. History now - this is the first time for Vegas 7e (the latest version) I had no troubles with earlier versions...

Dan

Comments

jrazz wrote on 8/10/2007, 8:15 PM
Do a search on here for mpeg calculator. Use that to adjust your bitrate. Allow Vegas to do your encoding not DVDA. Once you get the bitrate you need to fit your footage on the DVD, go into the custom settings and adjust your bitrate accordingly.

j razz
rs170a wrote on 8/10/2007, 8:31 PM
Rather than going to all that work capturing, editing, etc. (and you know it's going to be a lot), invest in a DVD recorder.
A decent one should be under $200 and it'll save you hours of work.
Blank DVDs are so cheap these days that you can easily afford one disc per VHS tape, even if it's only 6 min.

Mike
TheHappyFriar wrote on 8/10/2007, 10:42 PM
if you can capture in mpeg-2 then you can determine the bitrate in the software. unless you've got a powerhouse computer just re-capture @ the desired bitrate. 2.5 hours of mpeg-2 = 3837kbs video & 224kbs audio.

not counting menu's.
Former user wrote on 8/11/2007, 5:20 AM
Prepare but don't burn the DVD. Use DVD Shrink to make it fit a 4.7gig DVD. Believe me, you will not see any difference in quality and it is much faster than trying to re-encode to other bitrates.

Dave T2
farss wrote on 8/11/2007, 7:05 AM
Rendering from mpeg-2 to AVI will give you dramatically larger files, a DV25 file is 13GB / hour. At 100GB / hour sounds like you rendered to uncompressed.
As others have said, you've already encoded them as mpeg-2 but at too high a bitrate for them to fit. Simplest and quickest approach is to use DVDShrink to reduce the size, using it to go from 5GB to 4.7GB shouldn't do any harm.

Bob.
CVM wrote on 8/13/2007, 11:25 AM
I agree... definitely get a DVD recorder. A Panasonic Digi will run you $140 and is flawless. Go for the gusto and get one with a built-in HDD for twice as much, but with twice the ease. Using a DVD recorder does provide chaptering capabilities (albeit crude), but I can't image your client would care.

If you go with DVDA, why not use DL disks? Compatibility with consumer players is up.

BTW... I love getting jobs like this.... brainless, but they pay the bills! Plus, you can do them like laundry (don't have to sit and watch them). I got a job similar to these from a consumer for Betamax dubbing. I told her (older woman) I didn't have a Betamax machine and if she wanted me to do it, I needed to use hers. After the project, she GAVE me the Betamax player! It's in mint condition, came with the dust cover, remote, tape cleaner, and instruction booklet. Oh, plus she paid me $50 per DVD.

The DVD recorder was the BEST purchase I've made in a long time. PLUS.. you can control the record speed using 'flexible recording.' So, if you know a VHS tape is 124 minutes long, you can program the record to 124 minutes... and don't have to go to 4 hour mode and waste 56 minutes of blank disk. This keeps the playback quality great!