Longer Videos

tlpplk wrote on 2/13/2005, 9:14 AM
Well, I made the plunge and have moved from Pinnacle Studio 9 Plus to VMS. I'm working on my first video and have a quesiton (the first of many I'm sure). Alot of the videos I do are longer in nature 1 hour 15 minutes to 1 hour 30 minutes which means I need to change the bitrate to get the entire project on one DVD. I know that lowers the queality but for what I'm doing the quality difference isn't enough to matter.

When I did my first video, I rendered it in MS, went to DVDA and had to change the bitrate there which meant I had to rerender the video again which, in effect, doubled my rendering time.

My question is, can I change the bitrate in MS before I render the video or do I have to wait and do it in DVDA? If I have to wait until I get to DVDA, is there a way around having to render it a second time?

Comments

gogiants wrote on 2/13/2005, 12:04 PM
In Movie Studio version 4 they decided to remove the ability to change the bitrate of MPEG-2 rendering. Kind of annoying, but manageable.

The best route to avoid too much rendering time is to render in Movie Studio using the DV-AVI template. This will reduce your rendering time on the original render, at least if I'm correct in guessing that your source files are predominantly DV-AVI files.

Then, once you've done this, you can use DVD-Arch Studio to do the render into MPEG-2, adjusting the bitrate as it sounds like you've already done once or twice.

The big drawback to this approach is if you tweak your DVD (e.g. change your menu structure, add files, etc.) then DVD-Arch Studio will re-render the whole entire thing again. Not terribly desirable! What some people have done is to use a 3rd party MPEG rendering product where they can control the bitrate. In your case, if you know that you'll be making lots of longer movies, then springing for a $30 encoder (TMPGEnc, etc.) might be worthwhile.

The thing you'd want to avoid is to render to MPEG-2 using a given bitrate, then re-render the MPEG-2 file to yet another bitrate. This can take time and affect the quality of the end product.
jimmyz wrote on 2/13/2005, 12:07 PM
In VMS render to avi which I believe only renders changes, titles transitions and such. Then bring the avi into architect for the render to mpg. So the
answer is no to the bitrate change in VMS. I hope I'm wrong though.
You'll love VMS :)
tlpplk wrote on 2/14/2005, 5:11 AM
Unfortunately this is a major headache for me. Anyone know if Sony has a "Money Back Satisfaction Guarantee"?
ADinelt wrote on 2/14/2005, 7:18 AM
Have you actually tried rendering a movie as you suggest? I found that with MS3, I could get 1.25 to 1.4 hours of video on a single DVD without any problems.

Al
tlpplk wrote on 2/14/2005, 7:48 AM
Yes. The video I'm working with is about 1 hr 25 min long and when it went through the prep & burn it gave a warning that the video was too long to fit on the DVD. (I did not go ahead and burn it anyway so maybe it would have been okay even though I got the message.) The only way I could find around it was to change the bitrate and recompress the video and that required me to render the whole video again (3+ hours).
mmreed wrote on 2/14/2005, 9:01 PM
Thats not the only thing they removed from MS 4... they killed the SWF output option too!!!

Sony really took some useful things from us... I ask that those of you upset about this, contact them asking them to put back what they took!

Bitrate settings described in this thread, and the SWF output option.