Maximum length of DVD?

Shazbot wrote on 12/27/2004, 4:55 AM

Hi there.

Just starting to work with MS and DVD Architect, and I'm wondering what the maximum length of time is for being able to burn a DVD. With Pinnacle Studio 8, I was able to set custom compression levels to be able to fit almost three hours of video onto one DVD without too much loss of quality even, but so far after trying to make a DVD that is just under 90 minutes I don't seem to be able to choose any option that will make it fit. It keeps saying it is over 5 GB total.

But the process of this was to choose to make a DVD in MS and then automatically bring up that resulting MPEG file into DVDA. I'm wondering if rendering an AVI file first and then loading that into DVDA would make a difference? I'll have to try that, but I'd really appreciate anyone's info as far as how much footage they were able to fit on a DVD.

Thanks,
Shaz

Comments

Chienworks wrote on 12/27/2004, 5:02 AM

The problem you are having is that Movie Studio/Vegas Studio won't let you specify the bitrate when rendering to MPEG-2. In order to fit more on a disc you have to use a lower bitrate (which you obviously know) and Movie Studio won't let you do that. I don't have DVD Architect Studio, but i believe if you give it an AVI file it will let you specify a bitrate for MPEG-2 when preparing the disc.

I've produced a commercial DVD recently that contained over 2 hours and 45 minutes. I had to render at 3.2Mbps in order to fit it on a single disc. Fortunately the material was all very low motion under even stage lighting, so the encoding came out very usable. I also created a 2-disc set rendered at 6Mbps and showed both versions to the clients before making multiple copies. I explained that the single disc version would be lower quality and that they should determine which version fit their needs. The said they couldn't see any difference at all between them and that they would prefer one disc instead of two.

Depending on your material you may not be happy with the result of squeezing that much on a single disc.

ronatsony wrote on 12/27/2004, 9:30 AM

I have DVDA, and yes Chienworks, when you click the Make DVD/Prepare DVD/Optimize .avi files, it tells you the "estimated" disk usage. you can change the bit rate from the default of 8mbps to whatever to make it fit. i have not reached over 100% yet, so i have no idea how accurate the "estimated size" is.

i ALWAYS edit my avi files, add the markers, text, stills etc and then save as a NTSC DV format, so the result is an .avi file---the pq is as good as it gets from MS4. Then i use DVDA to make the mpeg files from the .avi files. i'm just following the suggestions posted here.....

hth,
ron