MPEG video waaaayyyyy too big! Help

mark003 wrote on 9/8/2009, 4:17 PM

I've been rendering a project in Main Concept MPEG-2 and with the template DVD Archi NTSC Widescreen no audio and I'm winding up with a 13 GB file. Why? It's only a 2-hour project on the timeline. How can I get this thing smaller?

Comments

John_Cline wrote on 9/8/2009, 4:30 PM

File size is exclusively a function of bitrate.

In order to fit 2 hours of video on a single DVD, you need to change the MPEG2 encoding average bitrate to about 4,850,000, maximum to about 8,500,000 and minimum to 2,936,000. This is assuming that you encode your audio at 192 Kbps AC3.

In the future, you can download, install and use this bitrate calculator:

www.johncline.com/bitcalc110.zip

Grazie wrote on 9/9/2009, 1:03 AM

John Cline! Thank you for the link!

That is just so easy to determine and see what the parameters actually do, do - amazing. - Esp. like the "Quality" bar. I've seen many over the years.

Mark Hamilton is a very clever guy . . .

Grazie

Chienworks wrote on 9/9/2009, 1:58 AM

The quality slider has virtually no effect on file size. It's primary effect is on rendering time. Set it to low quality and the render goes faster but with poorer output. Set the slider to high and the render goes slower but with better output. In either case, the resulting file size should be just about the same.

John_Cline wrote on 9/9/2009, 2:48 AM

I believe that Grazie might be referring to the quality display in the BITCALC bitrate calculator.

Grazie wrote on 9/9/2009, 2:56 AM

Yes? It's the bar within the calculator. I can see the dif between VHS<>SVHS<>DVD . . . HIGHEST quality. Neat!

Grazie