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Best Route to get a 100 Minute Feature Film to DVD?
I’ve recently started working on a feature film and am fairly confident in the aspects of creating the piece.. except I am very concerned about how to go about getting it onto a DVD with the highest quality possible.
The film is likely going to be around 100 minutes in length. So as far as exporting 100 minutes onto one DVD that has around 4GB in file size.. I just am not sure what route I should take as far as filetypes and exporting/authoring is concerned.
In the past I’ve edited a project that was 22 minutes long and sent it into iDVD and it didn’t seem to be a disaster in the slightest.. but that was a short video in comparison to this one, and I really am trying to preserve quality.
Should I maybe export the film to MPEG-2 so that the DVD authoring program (likely iDVD) will not have to compress/convert the file again? Or should I try exporting the project as a very high quality quicktime file, then compressing it with compressor (which I’ve never had to use)?..
I’m very confused as to how I should go about doing this and many of the posts I’ve been reading through almost seem to answer this question for me but not quite.
It’s just for standard DVD players, no Blu-Ray HD stuff. Just a simple movie that can play on any basic DVD player.
If there are any wise ones out there who can help me with this dilemma I would be incredibly grateful and in your debt for helping clear up this headache of mine. Thank you!
I’m a first time poster so please bare with my rookie nature.
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3 Replies
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[Jeremy Cathey] “Should I maybe export the film to MPEG-2 so that the DVD authoring program (likely iDVD) will not have to compress/convert the file again?”
Yes, try the MPEG-2 compression with the best application you can get Compressor is the most widely used on Macs (I use BitVice).
For authoring use an application that do not recompress. ToastTitanium can be an option if you don’t have DVDSTP.
rafael -
Jermey,
You’re only option for a DVD is MPEG-2. That’s the standard. Period. If you were doing Blu-Ray you’d have more options. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MPEG-2Compressor should get the job done for you. There are plenty of presets in there to get you rolling. A single-sided DVD can hold 4.6GB total (audio+video+menus). So as long as your encoded file falls under that your golden. After the file is transcoded drop it into DVD Studio Pro and burn away. If you don’t have DVDSP, you might look at Rafael’s suggestion above regarding Toast.
Ryan Holmes
http://www.ryanholmes.me
vimeo.com/ryanholmes -
Alright thank you Ryan and Rafael!
I think I have a pretty good idea of how to do this now. I will edit the film completely then send it to compressor (which I finally just opened up and examined) and use one of the DVD presets to make an MPEG-2 file that will work nicely for DVD authoring with either DVD Studio Pro or Toast Titanium. I’m not sure how to adjust the settings of the DVD presets to really make the film take up as much space as possible on the DVD rather than leave space leftover thanks to the preset settings.. but I’m sure I will figure out something with customizing a preset and messing around with the data rate.. or something along those lines. 🙂
Thanks again!
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