Rendering 2 hour video to DVD….understanding bitrates

[John Rofrano]

You need to lower the bitrate to about 4.5KBps to get 2hrs on a DVD. Use the Custom button on the Render window and on the Video tab make your average (bps) 4,500,000 (it defaults to 6,000,000 which is too high for 2hrs)

Alternately render to AVI and let DVD Architect fit the video to disc when it renders to MPEG.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com

[Jeremy Rasnic]

You could also burn the file as is to a dual layer disc without issue. The discs cost a little more, but it will save you another render and your file will not take a quality hit.

You do need to make sure your discs are good quality dual layer discs as some players have issues playing them (at least they did in the past). I don’t think it is that big of an issue now days as long as they don’t have an extremely old player. On top of that, if you are using Nero Burning Rom, you can change the book type of the DVD from +r to rom which should increase its compatibility.

j razz

[Mike Kujbida]

[Chris Franklin] “I actually asked about rendering this project to a single file in a previous post, but didn’t get much help so I had to resort to splitting the project into two files.”

Chris, I had a look at that previous post and I think you’re being a wee bit unfair to us.
There were responses from 3 of us with different suggestions, none of which you followed up on.
I’m certain that, had you stuck with that thread, we could have saved you some grief.

[Chris Franklin]

Hey Mike,
I didn’t mean to sound synical or anything with my comment, because this is a fantastic forum and you guys have helped me out tremendously in the past, but in response to….

There were responses from 3 of us with different suggestions, none of which you followed up on.

There were three responses…one was for my original post and two were pertaining to the way I rendered audio.

I didn’t reply immediately to the first comment because I felt it may be more of a memory issue, so I bought a new external hard drive and mentioned that later. I did however respond to the other two posts.

But with all of that aside…..

I’m going to try to follow John’s suggestion in lowering the bitrate. How did you come to the conclusion to lower the bitrate to KBps? Is there a previous post on understanding bitrates more?

As for the dual layer discs…that is definately an option, but I think I’m going to try adjusting the bitrates first. I have heard the same thing about some players not playing dual layer discs correctly so, so far, I haven’t tried them.

Thanks for the comments. I’ll let you know how it turns out. If anyone else has any suggestions, they are still more than welcome.

[John Rofrano]

> How did you come to the conclusion to lower the bitrate to KBps?

I used the bitrate calculator in Ultimate S Pro but there are plenty of free bitrate calculators on the internet if you do a search. It’s pretty straight math involving the resolution and frames per second.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com

[Steven Talley]

You could also render out the 6gb DVD file and use DVD Shrink on it to lover the bitrate to the exact file size you need. It’s quick and painless and may offer enough quality to get by.

My general rule of thumb for bitrate’s for DVD-5’s are 4k average for 2 hours, 6k for 1.5 hours and increase the top bitrate so complex material can have enough to look good.

My 2 cents.

[Chris Franklin]

Thanks guys…

I’m rendering right now so I can’t look at the options, but if I remember correctly there was an option to render to 3 different bitrates and then an option to render with one bitrate.

Which option is the best? Since John only mentioned changing one bitrate, I assumed that he was talking about the option with one bitrate and that’s what I’m trying now.

What’s the standard?

Chris

[John Rofrano]

> Since John only mentioned changing one bitrate, I assumed that he was talking about the option with one bitrate and that’s what I’m trying now.

Sorry for not being more clear. I was talking about the Average bitrate.

The Average bitrate is what’s important to file size. It determines what the overall average for the entire file will be. The Maximum bitrate says that you can go up to that if you need it but you must steal from other frames later to maintain the average. The Minimum bitrate is just a floor to not go below.

When you start dealing with lower bitrates you can sometimes get better quality by using the 2-pass option. this takes twice as long to render because it makes one pass to determine the bitrate it needs for each frame, then it plans where it wants to use the bits that it has available based on the need and makes a 2nd pass to do execute the plan and do the actual encoding. This way you get maximum utilization from your “bit budget”.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com

[Simon Page]

Interesting you say that. I’ve just had to squeeze 2hrs 50mins on a single DVD. With a smoky stage, the quality just was not acceptable on single pass. But a BIG difference on 2 pass – enough to go with it.
So I agree… if you’re squeezing – pass through twice 🙂

[Chris Franklin]

I’ve tried rendering with the following suggestion

You need to lower the bitrate to about 4.5KBps to get 2hrs on a DVD. Use the Custom button on the Render window and on the Video tab make your average (bps) 4,500,000 (it defaults to 6,000,000 which is too high for 2hrs)

and the total file size came to around 5GB. I used a bit rate calculator and now I’m re-rendering at 3728 kbps with a 2-pass.

Simon — I’m curious on how you were able to fit a 2hr 50min video on a DVD. How was the quality?