DVD’s only hold 5 gb? What if your project is longer?

[Mike Kujbida]

You’re not missing anything.
Hollywood DVDs are usually dual layer discs.
As long as it’s not something like 3 hrs. long it can go onto one DVD.
How long is your project?

[Jeff David]

compressed is 8.3

uncompressed is 11.3

Lenovo quad core i7 16gb of ram, Windows 8.1 MS 13 64 bit Thumbnail is view out of the Olde North Church window where the signal lanterns were hung, as in, \”1 if by land 2 if by sea\” looking across the Charles River to the Charlestown Naval Yard where rebels awaited the signal April 18th, 1775.

[Mike Kujbida]

Not how large in size but how long in hours and minutes.

[Jeff David]

1 hour and 52 minutes

Lenovo quad core i7 16gb of ram, Windows 8.1 MS 13 64 bit Thumbnail is view out of the Olde North Church window where the signal lanterns were hung, as in, \”1 if by land 2 if by sea\” looking across the Charles River to the Charlestown Naval Yard where rebels awaited the signal April 18th, 1775.

[Graham Bernard]

[Jeff David] “1 hour and 52 minutes”

Jeff, totally doable. The capacity you can achieve depends on a combination of the following :

1) Video noise is the amount granularity or pixel changes you have present. Things that create this can be low light pixelation that haven’t been rectified or smoothed out or denoised; fireworks that have been captured with a small capacity camera sensor; Motion variations and transition dissolves that haven’t been prerendered to create a reducing in noise. There may very well be a longer list, but I’ve found these to be my main culprits! Why are they important to reduce? Because at each and every frame that there is a change in colour, size and position of those particles or noise they will have to be encoded. The more changes there are the more math has to be done to achieved the bitrate of compression that is required. And THAT reflects in the final size of the encode and here that means the size of your DVD burnt. So, simply put, the higher the bitrate selected within your Render template the bigger that video file will become.

And here’s the thing: If you give your encoder the freedom to choose the bitrate for you, it will eat up as much of that bitrate it wants. It is a greedy animal and will bloat your final size of, for here, a DVD, easily beyond that 4.7gb size.

2) How long your video is. I’ve easily done a two hour DVD including complex Menus and quality audio.

So, where does that leave us? You need to wrangle in that large sized render and to get an idea just how BIG your bitrate has become. To do this I use a freebie s/w called, BitRate Viewer ! This has revealed to me where within the video and just needy/greedy that encode had become. Do use it by dragging that MPEG encode onto the interface, leave it until it has read that MPEG file and view the rates you’ve been using. It will stun you – it did me.

The next freebie to use is Mark’s DVD Creator. This is a COW post that will give a link to John Clines site. Using the calculator you can enter all your variables/parameters to get your DVD within that DVD 4.7gb.

So, to recap : Final DVD size is dependant on a combination of BitRate and total Playtime.

A) Know what you’ve got – BitRate Viewer.

B) Know what you can do to reduce video noise.

C) Know how to set your DVD Template. – Mark’s DVD Creator.

My apologies in advance if I’ve missed out or badly described the process, but it is the process I’ve followed through the years and works for me.

* Grazie

Video Content Creator and Potter
PC 7 64-bit 16gb * Intel® Core™i7-2600k Quad Core 3.40GHz * 2GB NVIDIA GEFORCE GTX 560 Ti
Cameras: Canon XF300 + PowerShot SX50HS Bridge

[Brigitte Rasche]

Hi Graham,
I just would like to know what Program you are using for creating a DVD menu?

Regards,
Brigitte

[Bill Burnette]

The Best Buy store clerk should have mentioned that there are dual layer writable DVDs (capacity 8.5 G), and there are inexpensive consumer-level DVD writers that can write them.

[Graham Bernard]

[Brigitte Rasche] “I just would like to know what Program you are using for creating a DVD menu?”

DVD Architect.

* Grazie

Video Content Creator and Potter
PC 7 64-bit 16gb * Intel® Core™i7-2600k Quad Core 3.40GHz * 2GB NVIDIA GEFORCE GTX 560 Ti
Cameras: Canon XF300 + PowerShot SX50HS Bridge

[Brigitte Rasche]

Thanks for your reply, I also use DVD Architect version 7 but have problems even when I use it as Admin. On a big project with 3 chapter marker the preview is working fine, can jump to each chapter but when I start to burn this project on a 8.2 disc then in the middle of that process emerges a message that I should put a layer break chapter marker at a certain time, this happens even I say before the program should set that layer break automatically. When I cancel the process to set that additional marker, my chapters are later in a mess because chapter 2 starts at that layer break point. It’s logical to me as it is just another Chapter marker in the wrong place.
Don’t know if I explained that good enough, just wanted to tell how disappointing that is after all that work.

Anyway, thank you,
Brigitte

[Edward Troxel]

You don’t need a dual layer for under 2 hours. You just need to render to the proper bitrate. Please see here for more details:

Newsletter Vol 1 #7 (June 2003)

Edward Troxel