Files to large to put on a playable DVD?

Question

This is my first time working with FCP and DVDSP, and I have no training on it at all, so I'm pretty much trying to figure out what I'm doing on the fly. I'm trying make a DVD with movies I exported from FCP. When I tried to burn the disc, though, I got an error message saying there's not enough space, my files are to large by about 4GB. Every method I've tried of compressing the files or exporting them differently has just resulted in them coming out even larger, except exporting them as MPEG4s, which made them look terrible. The video were shot in HD, 2 are about 30m each, one was exported at 1.5GB, the other at 400MB, the other 2 are about 5m each, one is 198MB (a photo slide show set to music), the other 1.74GB.
Is there a way I can compress these down or anything without actually having to start over from scratch? Please help! I'm working on a memorial video for a fallen Soldier and need to get it out to his family ASAP!
-Nav

Answer 1

Hi - welcome to the discussions.
You really do need to spend some time with the manual and tutorials in order to get a good handle on how this thing works... First up is the fact you'll need to downsample from HD to SD in order to get your footage to show up. DVDSP does not do 'blu ray', and the HD DVD format it did create is now no longer used. You have therefore only one option, and that's Standard Def.
In FCP you export your footage to Compressor to MPEG2 format, and the audio to AC3 (Dolby Digital) format. You'll end up with two files. These get imported to DVDSP as the assets you are authoring with. When using Compressor you have to get the settings right, and this is more of an art than a science - it really needs time and effort to get it right, but as a start point you have to encode the footage at a bitrate that will give you the best visual quality but at the smallest file size. This will vary according to your piece of footage, and no one size fits all here... however, you can make a good estimate of what you need from doing some bit budgeting. i.e. how long is the video file in minutes, and what size disc are you hoping to put it on? A simple bitrate calculator can be found here:
http://www.videohelp.com/calc.htm
This will tell you that if you have 1.5 hours footage (I note you have far less), and you encode the audio to AC3 at 192Kbps, and you are hoping to fit this onto a standard recordable disc, single layer - often sold as 4.7Gb capacity, they actually hold 4.37Gb for what we need to do - you need to encode at no more than 6.5Mbps. However, lower bitrates mean smaller file sizes and so you can fit more footage onto your disc, but you will start to see a loss in visual quality if you go too low. Similarly, if you go higher you will gain file size, but you will also improve visual quality up to a point. There is a law of diminishing returns here - you get a bigger file, but you'll see little or no difference over 7.5Mbps. Also, if you encode at higher than 7.5Mbps you run the risk of the disc not playing back too well in a lot of players. Some will be fine, others may 'choke'. The top bit rate allowed for your video is 9.8Mbps, but don't go there... you'll get nothing but trouble with a recordable disc, IMO. As I said - this is an art and a science - you have to spend time to get this bit right.
Once you have got the bitrate sorted and the files encoded you can move to authoring.
DVDSP needs to be started up to create a 'SD' disc - not HD. You need to go through the preferences and make sure this is set correctly. When done, import the footage (which will be less than 4.37Gb in total).
From there you should be good to go - add the assets to a track, create a menu and make at least one button, and point that at the track to get it to play. Set the end jump for the track to go back to the menu and you're about done.
There are about a hundred 'gotcha's' along the way, which I can't hope to set out here. One simple one is to create a short piece of black 'slug' and add it as a small track (about a second long), and set this as your first play item. Jump from that to a menu and the disc will be a little more compatible with more players. The menu will also be an issue for some folk - the visual quality can be lower than you want - set your preferences in DVDSP for encoding to be at least 4.5Mbps and VBR. These encoding settings operate on the menus and anything that is not already encoded to the correct format.
If you want to add chapter markers to help skip along the track then do so - but don't add any commands to them... they'll play back just fine one after the other. If you want to create a chapter index menu then that's easy enough too - but you then start to get into the decisions about how the playback should operate (i.e. one chapter and return to the menu, or start at the chapter and continue playing). It gets steadily more complex!
Good luck with it - come back with questions if you run into issues.