50Gig to 4Gig ?? Any recommendations

[Shane Ross]

No…what you need to do is use COMPRESSOR and encode the footage into the DVD format. There is a big difference in DVD AUTHORING and compressing data to fit onto a DVD.

#42 – Quick and dirty way to author a DVD

Shane’s Stock Answer #42 – David Roth Weiss’ Secret Quick and Dirty Way to Author a DVD:

The absolute simplest way to make a DVD using FCP and DVDSP is as follows:

1. Export a QT movie, either a reference file or self contained using current settings.

2. Open DVDSP, select the “graphical” tab and you will see two little monitors, one blue, one green.

3. Select the left blue one and hit delete.

4. Now, select the green one, right click on it amd select the top option “first play”.

5. Now drag your QT from the broswer and drop it on top of the green monitor.

6. Now, for a DVD from an HD source, look to the right side and select the “general tab” in the track editor, and see the Display Mode, and select “16:9 pan-scan.”

7. Hit the little black and yellow burn icon at the top of the page and put a a DVD in when prompted. DVDSP will encode and burn your new DVD.

THATS ALL!!!

NOW…if you want a GOOD LOOKING DVD, instead of taking your REF movie into DVD SP, instead take it into Compressor and choose the BEST QUALITY ENCODE (2 pass VBR) that matches your show timing. Then take THAT result into DVD SP and follow the rest of the steps. Except you can choose “16:9 LETTERBOX” instead of PAN & SCAN if you want to see the entire image.

Shane

GETTING ORGANIZED WITH FINAL CUT PRO DVD…don’t miss it.
Read my blog, Little Frog in High Def

[Liam Stephens]

More info needed! What u going to use it for…

If u need it as a data file – use compressor, h.264 or mp4 make sure its 16:9

If its for watching thru a DVD player using compressor convert to 16:9 standard def then make an M2v & ac3 out of it.

Mac 10.5.4
FCP 6.04
2 x 2.8ghz Quad Core Intel Xeon
16gb RAM
7 TB Maxx RAID
AJA Kona3

[Michael Gissing]

Are you sure about your file size? 50 gigs of HDV is over 4 hours. If so it won’t fit on a DVD

[Josh Evans]

actually now its over 100gig i miscalculated before it finished outputting.

It is a long timeline, around 3 hours.

is there no way to justcompress it all down to fit onto one DVD?

i want to play it in DVD players, not a data DVD

[Michael Gissing]

3 hours sounds like a dual layer disk for a playable DVD. You have to use mpeg2 for DVD. A DVDR single layer won’t actually get more than 3.7 gigs so the quality will be poor.

A double pass VBR encode will give best quality for smallest file size. I don’t know if compressor has a preset for that length.

[Ben Holmes]

Three hours of HDV is around 34Gb. You may well have a project with more than 100Gb in it, but that’s not what the size of an exported HDV file of the whole timeline would be.

Anyway – that’s not what’s important here. You need to export this timeline using compressor. Use a DVD preset, and select the longest time/higher quality setting – that’s BEST quality, 120 minutes. That will fit 2 hours of video on a standard single layer ‘DVD-5’, the DVDs usually with ‘4.7Gbs’ on the label. Then buy some dual layer disks and burn your mpeg/ac3 audio encoded movie using DVDSP. If you’re not comfortable with the DVD creation process, I can’t help you in a single post, so I’ll assume you’re happy with that.

You will not get any more than 2 hours of video on a ‘standard’ DVD at anywhere near acceptable quality – and don’t expect this 3 hour version to look amazing. If you have the time, tweak the bitrate in Compressor upward on this preset until your audio and video COMBINED is around 7-8Gb in size. You’ll only get 8.5 Gb on a dual-layer DVD, and you need to leave some headroom for the disk menus etc.

Ben

Edit Out Ltd
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[David Bogie]

go out and buy a DVD recorder with a hard drive in it, Panasonic makes several. Transfer your file to the HDD and then set the machine to record to DVD from HDD.

To pull HD to DVD is a waste of everyone’s time. You could have shot the thing through a Coke bottle onto VHS and it would have looked better that your DVD is going to look.

bogiesan

This is my standard sigfile so do not take it personally: “For crying out loud, read the freakin’ manual.”

[Mark Maness]

[david bogie] “To pull HD to DVD is a waste of everyone’s time. You could have shot the thing through a Coke bottle onto VHS and it would have looked better that your DVD is going to look. “

Now, Bogie… You know that’s not true.

HD going to DVD (if compressed correctly) looks alot better than SD video compressed for DVD. I have NEVER received a complaint about the picture quality besides TVs are going the way of 16×9 and it only makes sense to shoot this way.

In order for Josh to get the best results, I would compress his program using the best settings and lay it off to a dual layer DVD. It will look stunning.

_______________________________

Wayne Carey
Schazam Productions
https://web.mac.com/schazamproductions
schazamproductions@mac.com

[David Bogie]

[Wayne Carey] “Now, Bogie… You know that’s not true.
“

Sorry, I had a major sarcasm attack this morning. But, unless they’re just looking at a rough cut of this program, the whole approach to the release medium was wrong from the beginning. I think so.

If you shoot real HD in a widescreen format and then letterbox it down to fit on a DVD (assuming we’re not talking Blu-ray or some obscure HD capable DVD format) don’t you end up with MPEG2? Even using the best compression practices (which I don’t think were in the OP’s time allowance but I’m not going back to read the OP), you end up taking a thousand horizontal lines of information and smooshing the pixels into a display that is only about 400 pixels/lines high.

But, yeah, I know there are ways to improve that.

bogiesan

This is my standard sigfile so do not take it personally: “For crying out loud, read the freakin’ manual.”