How much footage to DVD?

[Brad Wright]

I wouldn’t recommend putting 2 hours of video on a DVD. Break it up to two DVDs and you’ll be much happier with the encode.

Brad Wright is software engineer, so often hard to figure out what he is talking about. He is always happy to explain answers further.

[Eric Pautsch]

Naaaahh…..2 hours is perfectly doable with media encoder. Go to dual layer if need be

[Jeff Pulera]

Quality is very subjective, as you have seen from the varied replies. I have to side with Eric and say two hours is fine. Been doing it for 10 years and ZERO complaints about quality. In fact, I’ve done many productions that were 2.5 hours or more on a single 4.7GB disc! Have never moved to DL because of cost/compatibility concerns, and making a two-disc set doubles labor and costs for me.

I won’t argue that quality degrades as the program gets longer – that’s a given – but the public is now very used to watching cr*p on YouTube all day and I don’t think the average person notices the compression artifacts that us picky video editors look for! Not saying my discs look “bad”, because I do have standards, but good enough for the clients (wedding, event, corporate) apparently.

I recently videotaped my kid’s school play at over 2.5 hours, and without my knowing, another parent had taped it another night and was making copies for people. Come to find out he authored to THREE DVDS!!! Really? I can see two, but seriously…and whose production quality was higher? Yes, the single DVD.

To find the data rate for longer encodes, I use 560/minutes=rate, and just round down a bit for safety/menu space. For instance, 120 minutes = 4.66, encode at 4.5 and you’re good to go. This will start another debate, but I seldom use VBR, and stick with CBR in most cases.

Jeff Pulera

[Joe Seamans]

Thanks, Jeff, this is good advice which I can test easily enough. One question, though, is the equation you supplied. According your example you encode at 4.5. Is this times 100 or something? I’ve been encoding at 1000 up to 5000 using Sorenson Squeeze. 4.5 seems low, but 450 would make sense. Am I right?

[Jeff Pulera]

Hi Joe,

Different apps use different notation. Adobe would be 4.5, while Sorenson will show 4500, same thing. Sorry for any confusion. Don’t encode at 450 😉

Jeff

[Chris Tompkins]

With long programs like yours I strive to maximize the files size and quality to fit the disc. In other words if I try a bitrate and it finishes and the file size is 3.5GBs, I’ll up the bit rate some and try encode, as to not waste any space.

Chris Tompkins
Video Atlanta LLC

[Jeff Pulera]

Hi Chris,

The trial and error method would take a LOT of time. The 560/minutes=bitrate thing works pretty well, or there are bitrate calculators available online. Nothing worse than coming up 2MB too large to fit, then having to start over! Been there.

Regardless of which method you use to calculate or “guesstimate” the bitrate, there are variables that can throw things off, like using motion menus that take additional space on the disc, so you must account for that as well.

Jeff Pulera
Safe Harbor Computers