I'm not sure I understand why I would need two DVD disks for 2-3 hours of video...even at the highest resolution possible. Are the commercial DVD's like "Lord of the Rings" recorded with a diferent technology than what's available to users of DVDA or other DVD authoring software? I think those DVD's are like 3 hours and the picture is obviously incredible.

I have an extensive background with audio production and understand that sample rate and bit depth will effect how much data I can store on a CD. But, once I dither my audio to 16-bit, 44.1khz, then I have the same amount of recording time on a CD as the professional CD's. The source material means nothing...I can have a really bad recording and as long as it's industry standard 16-bit, 44.1, I have 80 minutes of record time on the disc.

Are DVD's not the same in this regards? Shouldn't I be able to burn a three hour video with full menu capabilities without losing quality? Am I missing something?

Does the type of source material (low quality vs broadcast quality) have an effect on how much actual video you can record on a DVD? I ask this because I could see if you have VHS for your source material, the encoders have to "work" that much harder for it to look acceptable whereas broadcast quality is already there and therefore you don't add to the file size by optimizing it for quality. I'm grasping at straws here, but I'm trying to understand this.

Am I right on this or are the professional studios using longer CD's that are not available to us? I've read about multi-layered disks and double-sided DVD's...is this why they are able to fit 3 hours of broadcast quality video on one disk?

Thank for you help with this and the heads-up on the 8x Pioneer burner!

Scott Quillin
www.scottquillin.com

My 2 cents -

Comercial DVD are 2 layer - 9.4GB, PC Burner today are single layer - 4.7GB - half size. There are many talks about 2 layer PC burner to come.

DVDA only support MPEG2 at PAL or NTSC full resolution. This means that all yoour material, regardless of source (VHS at half size or HD at much bigger size) are all rendered at the same frame size. Note that the standard does allow other resolution like half resoultion that can be great for VHS source.

You control the MPEG bit-rate. The higher the bitrate and/or better source will give you better result. Comercial DVD, coming from excelent source with little noise are encoded at 6Mb/sec. Home made DV video ususlly requires higher bit-rate.

At 8Mb/sec (DVDA and Vegas default), with audio and menus - you can put about 70min of video. At 6Mb/sec you can place about 100min. (Comercial DVD will have about 200min).
For 3Hour video - you need about 2-3Mb/sec.

VHS source is actually low quality and low resoulution, so you can try to reduce the bitrate to 2-3Mb/sec - and check the result. You might have problems in fast movements or noisy situation.

Hope that helps, UDI

UDI,

Thanks so much! That's exactly what I was looking for. You covered everything in detail and I appriciate it very much. It all makes sense now.

One last question since I know more about this stuff now (thanks)! Is the limitation of 4.7GB strickly on the burner or is it a limitation with the DVDA software as well? I don't want to pay all this money to go from Vegas 4 to DVDA and then in a couple months do it all again for an update.

Is there any word on when the 2 layer burners will be available? Why in the world would they not have that out already? Seems to me this would be very important for indi film makers and such. To be limited to one hour is pretty lame IMO...but it's better than nothing at this point.

I guess I'll have to burn a few expensive "coasters" as I test the resolution quality and find what works best for the project. Do you know if you can burn multiple resolutions on one disc instead of wasting DVD's? I sure hope so!

Thanks again for the help!

Scott Quillin
www.scottquillin.com

I have used DVD Shrink to shrink a commercial DVD to under 4.7 Gig. The results were pretty good. I am not sure how good that would be on DVDA generated files. I'll have to give it a try.

There are some 2 layer burners, and there was a thread about support of 2 layer by changing the firmware on existing burner. Look for this in Vegas and this forum. I don't know about the required media and compatability with desk-top. You can find a lot of information at http://www.dvdrhelp.com

As far as I know, DVDA does not have a 4.7G limit, you actually define the limit in the prefference (BTW the default DVDA value is 3.9G). I bellive that DVDA will support 2 layer, but Sony need to answer that.

For test, you can try +RW or -RW media, so you can re-write it multiple times. and save the coasters for later.

About multiple resolution - DVDA only support PAL, PAL-WIDE, NTSC and NTSC-WIDE formats. You can combine Wide and Non-wide on the same disc. You can not combine others. The only thing you can play with is bit-rate. And yes, you can place different medias each with different bitrate on the same dvd.

Udi

Thanks wobblyboy....I'll check that out. However, since I can't burn a DVD more than 4.7GB, I won't have anything to shink! Still, it's good to know that there's something out there like that.

Thanks!