long video on DVD

[Joe Bowden]

It won’t be possible to get 12 hours of video onto a single DVD, if that’s what you’re asking.

Can you define what you mean by “the best way”? What’s most important to you: getting it onto as few discs as possible (lowest video quality), acceptable video quality, or highest video quality?

[David Carey]

There will be content from 3 days of shooting. Each of which will produce approximately 4 hours of media.

My question is regarding the best way to put this much media on DVDs(multiple). Each 4 hour session may have 2 or 3 parts so it might be possible to have these be individual presentations. Exporting 2 or 4 hour segments will create massive files that may be too big to handle. Is there a recomendation for a process?

It may be possible to use a medium quality file but without too much degrading of image or sound.

Is there any other system that might be used besides encoding and authoring? A DVD recorder?

Any ideas?

[Joe Bowden]

It won’t be difficult on the production side of things- you’re only limited by your system. Once you go to DVD, you’re limited by the size of the disc you are delivering on.

Very generally speaking, you can have up to 2 hrs of video on a single DVD5 disc that will be of what I might consider acceptable quality. Your definition of acceptable quality may vary, and much of it will depend on the type of video that will be encoded. For instance, scenes with lots of detail and motion will take more bandwidth on the disc to achieve ‘acceptable’ video quality than a static head shot and a simple background.

It is possible to get 4 hrs of video onto a single DVD5, but quality will be low. Better quality can be achieved if you author for DVD+R DL (or DVD9).

A DVD recorder may be helpful for you (you’ll have less control over the transcoding process than you would in a software or hardware encoder), but can introduce problems if you need to add more than just its templated menus (you’d have to strip video & audio streams off the disc, and then import them into your authoring program).

[David Carey]

I have had some DVDs that came from a DVD recorder that were inconsistant in playback on various drives or decks. Any recomendation for kind of DVD recorder to use for best results?

[Jeff Bellune]

David,

Just a word of caution, here. It sounds like you are planning on dumping raw footage onto DVD for display/archival reasons.

If you ever intend to edit said footage, then dumping to disc now is a bad decision. I’ll spare you the boring technical details, but you will be better off dumping to an external hard drive and saving as DV avi files. If you’re using an HDV camera, then capturing/dumping to .m2T or similar on a hard drive is still better than dumping to SD DVD.

The only way an external drive wouldn’t be a better solution now is if the camera originally recorded the footage as highly compressed mpeg2 video.

-Jeff

The Focal Easy Guide to Adobe Encore DVD 2.0

[David Carey]

to clarify:

After editing the material we would deliver it on DVD. If we did a customary DVD authoring we would create massive files to deal with. What we are considering is exporting the editing material (in 2 hour segments)directly onto a DVD recorder much like you would master onto tape. My question is… what type(s) of DVD recorders are most reliable for playback?

thanks
David

[Jeff Bellune]

If you will be recording and playing back on the same machine, then almost any brand will do.

If you will record and distribute, then good luck. Some (many? all?) DVD recorders manipulate the video and the file system such that playback in many brands and models of hardware DVD players is not certain at all. At the very least, expect less compatibility than discs authored in the customary fashion.

Also, exercise caution regarding the firewire ports on these units. Some devices will be recognized by your computer and/or editing software and some will not. For example, my old Panasonic unit’s firewire port would accept video from my camera, but not from my computer. Unfortunately, AFAIK, the only way to be sure is to actually test the unit, unless the product’s marketing materials specifically address the firewire issues.

-Jeff

The Focal Easy Guide to Adobe Encore DVD 2.0