Confused about how much content I can add

Question

Hey Everyone,
I have been doing projects that are about 30 minutes. Now, I have a project that is almost 4 hours. How do I put it onto a DVD? Looking at the book and it is very complicating.
thanks,
Mark

Answer 1

You need to compress your footage so that it fits in the space available on your disc. There are several different capacities of disc that you could use, including single and double sided, and single or dual layer. It is most likely that you'll be using single sided discs, but could be either single or dual layer. If single, you have got 4.37Gb of space.
From what you say you have also got some options regarding compressing the footage. The usual method would be to convert to MPEG2 using Compressor (or any other MPEG encoder), setting the target bitrate such that the resulting file will be smaller than 4.37Gb. This means the bitrate will need to be low, and as a result the visual quality will suffer. As a guide, if you put all four hours as MPEG2 onto a single sided, single layered DVD, and you use AC3 audio at 192kbps, you will have to encode the footage at 2.2Mbps for it all to fit. This is somewhat low.
If you use a dual layer disc, you can raise that to a more respectable 4.3Mbps.
However, you can also try using MPEG1 footage on a DVD - the quality will be quite similar to VHS, but because the bitrate of MPEG1 is so low (just 1.5Mbps) you will easily fit it all on to a single sided, single layer disc.
The final option is to use 'Half D1' footage, which has a visual quality similar (but IMO better) to MPEG1. Not all encoders can create Half D1, but BitVice can.
So - make a choice about which disc type you will use, then encode the footage to fit into the space available. Use a bitrate calculator to work it out if you need to (google for bitrate calculator), but be aware that low bitrates, MPEG1 and Half D1 will give you lower quality results than MPEG2 at a reasonable bitrate with your footage spread over multiple discs.