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One DVD vs 2 DVDs for 4 hour video
I’m finishing a 4-hour DVD that will be replicated by a dupe house and I am wondering what the pros and cons are of going with the entire program on one DVD or on two or more disks. The program consists of 35 chapters so it could be broken up fairly easily. Any thoughts would be appreciated.
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10 Replies
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The more you cram on a disc = higher the compression= lower image quality.
Gary Kleiner
Learn Vegas and DVD Architect
http://www.VegasTrainingAndTools.com
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There is a significant difference between 2hr DVD and 4hr DVD. Quality will be WAY worse than a bad VHS, or VCD.
Burn them both and put them side by side to compare on your tv.
Now, if you are using a DVD-9, then you should be ok.
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If I put it on one it will be DVD-9. I do like the simplicity of packaging and delivery of one DVD.
The program when rendered in Vegas with the DVDA NTSC template and AC-3 at 192 come out to 11Gb. I don’t want to sacrifice much quality – the program is about 50% talking heads, the rest normal action. I’m thinking if I rerender all 35 chapters in Vegas to Mpg2 using 8000/4800/192 I may be able to get it down to 8.5Gb to fit on a DL DVD. Do you think that would work or would I need to compress more?
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The bitrate calculator I use gives a VBR of 7500/4300/2500 for a 4 hr. video. I’d drop these numbers a bit for a safety margin.
Another option is, since you already have a rendered version, to use DVD Shrink (google it, it’s free and a great tool) to bring it down to the proper size.
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Thanks, Mike. One question, the rendered files I have are Mpg2, not .avi, so won’t DVD Shrink be rerendering Mpg and won’t that degrade quality?
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Use DVDA to render the files into AUDIO_TS & VIDEO_TS folders and save them to a folder on your hard drive.
Then run DVD Shrink on the folder.I don’t claim to understand the technical details of it’s workings.
There’s a website somewhere that goes into detail on this but I didn’t bother to bookmark it 🙁
All I know is that it does what it does quite well.
Try it and see if it meets your expectations. -
Mike, that sounds like a simple solution and I ran the prepared files through DVD Shrink. But then when I went to burn the “shrunk” files in DVDA to a DL DVD an error box said it “could not suggest a valid layer break region”.
The dialog box said to “examine the error log for suggestions” – I have no idea where to find the error log.
The Finish button is grayed out so I can’t continue.
What would you do?
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Sorry Richard but I’ve never tried dual layer discs so I’m not sure what’s going on.
I did google DVD Shrink error log and got several hits so I’d suggest going that route.
Another concern I noted was the use of good media. A number of folks had similar problems. A simple switch to good media solved their problems.As far as an error log, maybe they’re talking about the Application log in Event Viewer or the System log.
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Instead of DVD Shrink, couldn’t you just click “optimize” in DVDA to make it fit exactly to the disc? I’ve never used DL discs before, heard too many bad things about them.
I would think it would not need to be shrunk all that much for a dual layer disc.
Re: DVDShrink, is there a setting to tell it that is going to a DL DVD that you missed? -
I’ve had no trouble with burning to DL on previous projects, but this is the first one that needed to be shrunk.
I tried the Optimize feature in DVDA but all it seemed to do is indicate which of the many, many files needed to be compressed – I found no way to have it automatically compress the files that needed it most or how much to compress which files manually. The documentation on using the Optimize feature is pretty meager from what I could find.
Also tried Fit To Disk and an error box said the “media was too large to fit to disk” (duh) (yes, it knew I was using DL).
It seems like DVD Shrink will work if I can figure out a way around the layer break thing. In no time at all Shrink processed my 11Gb files, reducing them to 78% so they’d fit on an 8.5Mb DL disk. But it seems that when shrinking the prepared files the layer break gets lost and I haven’t found a way to have a burning program (I tried both DVDA and RecordNowDeluxe) find the break or make a new one. I don’t know if it’s even possible to insert a new layer break after the files have been prepared in DVDA. Perhaps someone knows how to do this, or if it can be done? This video has 36 different chapters so I’d think there would be a suitable break point in there somewhere.
Meantime, I’ll check on a DVD Shrink group (I’m going to need a real Shrink before this project is done) and see what I can learn. Thanks for all your help.
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