Amount of time on final DVD export

[Vince Becquiot]

If you feel bad about “throwing out” content, just give the client a raw DVD as well with the edited version. Call it “outtakes” if you like 🙂

I know that weddings videos are a special case, since the only people watching them are usually just the the bride and groom themselves, but adding content to a DVD just because you have space goes against one of the very basic rules of editing, which is its actual definition: “The removal of unwanted footage.”

Although I only shot one wedding, they were very happy with the 15 minutes I pulled from the 6 hours of tape. Make it snappy, work harder on making those shorter segments creative and enticing.

Cheers,

Vince

[Vince Becquiot]

And with all of that typing, I forgot to mention that with the best bit rate (8 MB/s CBR), you should fit about 1 hour of video. (Depending on the audio codec)

If 1:15 only fiil 4 Gigs, you are compressing too much.

Use a bit rate calculator (Steven has one on his site) and enter the min, avg, max manually.

Vince

[Zvi Twersky]

Hi!

You didn’t understand my question so please let me explain:

I DO NOT cut out footage! A wedding is usually 3 – 4 disks. The fist disk is the “Highlights” disk. It’s only an hour of clips and dancing. It sums up the wedding so you can enjoy and get a picture of the event in an hour.

In my question, I was explaining that when exporting the wedding, I try to put it all in 3 disks by doing 1:15 per disk. If there is more footage, of course I will do 4 disks.

So that’s why I asked how much can go into a disk.

By the way, we do 8 or 9 MB\s (Don’t remember what I set it to off hand) but we do VBR which I have researched and it DOES give a better compression then CBR but doesn’t effect the quality at all since it’s only compressing more at places that it can, without reducing quality from the bitrate you set as min, avr, and max.

[Nathan Tinsley]

I don’t think it’s to any advantage to “leave some space” at the end of the disc for scratches but one thing you might want to be careful of is raising that bit rate too high. 8 Megabits is pushing it when you add audio, especially if you don’t compress the audio. Sometimes players have a hard time when the data rate reaches the maximum spec for DVD which is 10.08 for video and audio together. The max bit rate for DVD video by the way is 9.8. As you approach this ceiling you run the risk of older or flakier, cheaper players not being happy! I typically do 7 megabits and CBR if its just for dubs or something that’s not too long.

[Vince Becquiot]

Zvi,

Nathan is right about keeping you bitrate at a lower setting. I honestly never ran into issues at 8 MB/s with PCM audio, and I’m sure I sent out over 2000 DVDs by now. Just be ready to ship the client a $50.00 player if they like to buy their AV equipment at deep discounts 😉

You also have to be careful to encode 1 or 2 x to avoid errors on cheaper burners.

As for VBR, it’s only useful above one hour of video. Since 8MB/s should be your max at VBR, if you are encoding at 8MB/s constant, there won’t be any further compression, and you are likely shaving 5 to 8 hours on your total encoding time. (On a 2 pass encode with 4 DVDs).

Do follow Nathan’s advise however. 9 MB/s on DVDR is not recommended unless you are an AV dealer.

To be exact, you can fit up to 63 minutes with PCM at 8MB/s constant. (GOP structure may affect that a little)

After that, it’s VBR world, and you should definitely use a calculator.

Vince