Is it possible to get 220 minutes onto a DVD and have it look good?

[Mark Spano]

Any time I’ve tried doing this, the best results I’ve found have been with playing it out, real time, to a standalone DVD recorder. The extended play encoders seem to be able to do a slightly better job than any offline encoder I’ve used. Understand, however, that no standalone DVD recorder I know will encode anything other than a 4×3 full frame – if you absolutely need anamorphic, then you have to use an offline encoder and author in DVD Studio Pro or the like.

[Chris Blair]

You can record to a hardware based DVD recorder then use a little program called ifoedit to change the 4:3 flag to 16:9. We do it all the time for long-format stuff that would otherwise be a pain to software encode then author to DVD.

Here’s a tutorial (and link to download the free software).

https://www.dvdr-digest.com/articles/42_1.html

It’s Windows only so if you’re on a Mac, you’ll have to find another solution, but I imagine there is a similar tool out there somewhere for Mac as well.

Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com
Read our blog http://www.videomi.com/blog

[Mark Spano]

Chris, that is great. I never thought to edit the structure files after the fact. I looked and found a Mac app that does it pretty easily.

My DVD Edit

And a nice tutorial:

here

I will definitely put this to use. Thanks again for the tip!

[Greg Harriott]

Thanks for the suggestions. I never would have thought of using a hardware based recorder to do this. I want to have a menu with graphics, buttons, chapters etc. Is there anyway to make that work with what you are suggesting?

[Mark Spano]

To do that sort of thing would require some more complicated messing around. Basically, you’d copy the DVD contents from the disc, and open the DVD in MPEG Streamclip. From there, you can Demux to M2V and AC3. Now since the feature is long, you might wind up having multiple M2V and AC3 files that you’ll have to string together in DVD Studio Pro. In there, you can add your menus and other fun stuff. That’s the only way I could see all of this working – you’d have to test it to make sure that there won’t be any picture breaks (from stringing multiple files together on the DVDSP timeline).

[Rich Rubasch]

Exactly. We do this a lot as well. Feed the DVD recorder an S-Video signal and set it to record to the correct length. Use MPEG Streamclip to export sections using the In-Out keys (I and O) Demux to MP2 and AC3. Author in DVD SP.

Rich Rubasch
Tilt Media Inc.
Video Production and Post
Owner/President/Editor/Designer/Animator
https://www.tiltmedia.com

[Greg Harriott]

Thanks again for the suggestions. Does anyone have a link to a good standalone DVD recorder?

I have been running some tests with cinemacraft’s encoder: https://www.cinemacraftusa.com/cinemacraft_encodermp.php and am getting some nicer results. Does anyone know if the workflow outlined here would give me better or worse results than CCE?

Thanks,

-Greg

[Tom Laughlin]

So, my question is, how do the major studios do it? Like with Lord of the Rings, being like 2-3 hours, plus the bonus features, all on one SD DVD? Can anyone answer this? Always wondered this.

Tom Laughlin
Producer/Editor
Salt Lake City, UT
FCP7/Sony EX-3/Mac Quad-Core Intel

[Mark Spano]

Tom,

Keep in mind that almost 100% of studio DVD releases are dual layer. That gives you 8.5GB of space on a disc. With a handy tool like the Excel bit budget doc that Ken Stone came up with, you can see that a DVD feature of 2 hours with 5.1 and stereo audio, plus another half hour of bonus features with the same will be able to be encoded at an average bit rate of 5.5 Mbps, which is perfectly adequate for MPEG-2 VBR on a DVD. Most commercial DVDs I’ve measured come in around an average of 4.2 Mbps, varying wildly from 1.8 to 7.7 second to second. A very good MPEG-2 encoder will take advantage of variable bit rate compression to give better than “average” rate results. Compressor can be really good, but there are likely standalone encoders or dedicated software that can do better.

[Rich Rubasch]

Also most of those DVDs originate with 24 fps material with no fields so they have a 20% gain on quality per second because of the reduced frames. They also encode from a very high rez source. I believe they also use encoders that support segmented encoding so they can go back and encode short segments into the final encode to fix trouble areas…much better than a simple 2 pass VBR.

Add in a dual layer disc and you can keep quality very high.

Rich Rubasch
Tilt Media Inc.
Video Production and Post
Owner/President/Editor/Designer/Animator
https://www.tiltmedia.com