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Is a 2.5 hr. DVD possible with decent quality?
I filmed a funeral service and the graveside service for a family. The woman’s husband and son-in-law were the ministers and were both quite lengthy in there sermons. The total time ended up being almost 2.5 hours. I used a bitrate calc and ended up rendering at a somewhat less rate than the calc came up with (2000, 4000, 6000 VBR). But when I go to author the DVD it shows that I’m using 103% of the disc space. If I drop the average down to 3600 and the maximum to 5000 will it degrade the quality too bad? I used a Sony VX2100 camera so the picture is really good. I’d rather not have to end up rendering two seperate DVDs but I’ve never done a project of this length before. Any advise on getting this project to fit on a single DVD?
TIA
Ted -
3 Replies
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2.5 hours should be no problem at all. If you’re useing DVDA to author the DVD try setting the bitrates to 8,000—3,823—and 2,000 WITH AC3 audio.
These figures came straight off of Edwards newsletter VOL 1 Number 7 (June 2003) and I have been using it since. It’s flawless in the numbers. BTW these numbers assume a VBR. While 3823 seems low for quality it actually isn’t bad at all. I recently did a job of about the same length with pretty much the same numbers and it played nicely on a 42 inch TV.
HTHs
Don -
The only way to know for sure is to try it and see Ted. The quality will depend on the nature of the footage – the more moving, whether camera movement or background within the frame, the more the image will degrade at a low bitrate, but there have been reports of satisfactory results with 2.5 hours. Two pass may help, as this should concentrate resources where they’re most needed. Good luck, and let us know how it goes.
Peter Wright
Perth, Western Oz
http://www.allroundvision.com.au -
Thanks Don and Gary for your input. I was hoping you guys could give me some insight since each render of this project takes a little over 3 hours (quite a long wait to experiment). I ended up doing a single pass render with VBR 2000, 3600, 5000 and the quality looks surprisingly good, even a spinning ceiling fan looks natural. All of the footage was shot with the camera on a tripod. DVDA now shows 93% disc usage and Nero shows the total data to be just over 4 gig. I used a simple text menu with nine chapter marks. Gained some valuable info on this project. Just burned a copy and it plays and looks fine.
Thanks again guys!
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