Timeline length for DVD

teacherlady wrote on 4/14/2010, 6:50 PM

How long can a project be on a timeline in order for it to fit on a DVD? Is compression involved? Is there an indicator in Movie Studio that I am missing that indicates whether it will fit on a DVD . . . just a regular DVD not double-sided.

Comments

teacherlady wrote on 4/14/2010, 7:01 PM

Reason for the request . . . I have a student that has created about a 29 hour project--converting all of her VHS to DVD and importing to the timeline. We are currently breaking it up and rendering just sections to a DVD but wondered if 2 hours was about the max on the timeline to fit on each DVD.

musicvid10 wrote on 4/14/2010, 8:21 PM

Since you are a teacher,

Bitrate (Mb/s) x Time (s) = File Size (Mb)

1 GB = 8192 Mb

You can fit 4.35 GB of video on a standard DVD disc, allowing for menus and such.

It is not at all about what "length" you can "fit" on a DVD; it is about the amount of data you can fit, depending in turn on how much compression quality loss you are willing to suffer in order to do so.

That being said, DVD Architect will recompress anything over about 1 hr 35 minutes that was rendered in Movie Studio using the DVDA templates, taking considerable extra time to do so. So, one and a half hours per disc is the way to go with such a large undertaking.

(Personally, I don't go much over 2 hours per disc, because the quality suffers accordingly. However, with VHS source material, you may get by with a little more because it is bad quality to begin with.)

teacherlady wrote on 4/15/2010, 6:24 AM

Fabulous - - - we were "guessing" that but it's nice to have it confirmed --we were breaking the segments of the timeline and rendering 1 1/2 - 2 hours per segment. There were no titles or extras of any kind--just simply pulling off the VHS tapes, so it'll be fine! Thanks!