authoring a dvd over two hours

[Bill Stephan]

You had better have access to a good MPEG-2 encoder in order to retain the image quality at the bitrate you will need to use to fit two+ hours.

Bill Stephan
Senior Editor/DVD Author
USA Studios
New York City

[George Wing]

How long is the “plus”? 2 hours plus 5 minutes? 2 hours plus 55 minutes? etc…

What type of burner/discs are you dealing with (DVD5, DVD9, etc…)?

[Arty Gold]

it’s 2 hours and 37 minutes…
normally i just burn it straight to a panasonic dmr… (dvd burner)
but i hate that menu that pops up (the consumer blue background with yellow bars)

my internal drive is the normal superdrive 8x…that comes with the computer i think it’s NEC

and i only use verbatim’s usually 8x dvd-r

[George Wing]

For a PC solution, I would record with your DVD recorder, then import the video assets using something like Ulead’s DVD MovieFactory 4.0 (it will give you better menu options that the DVD Recorder’s basic menu).

Then create some menus and chapter buttons, and burn to disc (without re-encoding — assuming your dvd burner could fit the 2:37 onto a DVD5 disc).

hth,
George

[Arty Gold]

thanks…but is there a mac equivilent ?
i’m assuming you are talking about burning the dvd the way i have been and then…ripping the video elements out so i can use my own menu system ?