How does Hollywood make a 2 hour DVD? Why can’t I?

[Chris Borjis]

Any posts having to do with compression can reveal that.

Thats all it is really.

There are many times though that its easily accomplished through a dual-layer disc if you have a really high bitrate.

A 2 hour disc can easily be done on single layer if you have
the bitrate set right. Depends on your encoder though, wether
it will look good or not. Procoder and the 50 dollar version
of Cinemacraft have outstanding encoding abilities in the
lower half of the bitrate range.

My panasonic DMR-E30 recorder can do full D1 with VBR encoding
up to 2 hours and 12 minutes and it looks fine.

You will definitely need to encode at VBR and with a suggested
bitrate range from 4,000 to 6,000. (guessing) Maybe less.

[Eric Pautsch]

“Hollywood” DVDs are encoded at much lower bit rates – Around 4Mbs and lower. The reason is thier source material is of very high quality and they have access to very expensive encoders that work well with low bitrates.

Know one should assume thier DV footage will look anywhere near the original with an inexpensive MPEG encoder like Bitvice or Procoder.

[Chris Borjis]

Eric have you used Procoder or cinemacraft on DV footage?

If you have the settings tweaked properly you can indeed
get really great encoding from it.

Cinemacraft is used by a lot of professional studios btw.
It specifically beats all others at low bitrates.

But it is true that better source material always helps.

[Jason Casey]

Our SD-1000 card gives us great results at lower bitrates. We easily get 2 1/2 – 3 hours on a DVD with good quality….or course the source tape must be of high quality to start with. Usually ours are either Digi-Beta or DV-Cam

[Tom Volotta]

The original Hollywood requirement was to fit 133 minutes on a single sided DVD-5. This included one Dolby Digital 5.1 and two 2.0 audio streams, along with three SubPicture streams for subtitles, and a handful of relatively simple Menus. This allows for an average MPEG-2 video bitrate of 4.5 Mbps, which will yield very good quality.

In general, MPEG-2 encoders would prefer to see a 4:2:2 input source rather than 4:1:1.

There are a wide range of inexpensive software and hardware encoders that can do the job quite well.