How to force 3 to 4 hours of video at very low quality to Single Layer SD DVD-R ?

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How to force 3 to 4 hours of video at very low quality to Single Layer SD DVD-R ?

Before I buy FCP X and Compressor, I'm hoping I can get some simple advice on whether this software can do what I have been doing with other software that no longer works.I am not a sophisticated movie maker but just do enough to get the job done. I am recording video using eyeTV ( internal mpg2 file ) up to 4 hours long and then exprting to DV. I have been adding a title & time code hr:min:sec to each frame using QTsync. Then I create a DVD image using Visual Hub which I use to burn the entire video to a single layer standard DVD-R for playing in most DVD players or computers. I have had acceptable results although Visual Hub sometimes blows up at about 3.5 + hours. My videos average 2.5 hours so very few fail on Visual Hub. These videos are being used for archival purposes and are not going to be projected onto the local Cineplex screen.

Since both QTsynch and Visual Hub are dead products I am forced to move on. Mac OS has been a great platform for these old programs and I'm hoping to stay there. I have a late 2011 Mac Mini with a 2.5 GHz Intel Core i5, 4 GB RAM,and the AMD Radeon HD 6630M graphics processor. I'm runing the latest 10.7.5 Lion. I have TB's of external storage.

My requirements are very specific with the entire video being on one disc being first, understandable audio being second, and video image quality not being a requirement at all. The video image is just coming along for the ride. When the video does not fit I change to a single audio only disc and drop the video. I'm willing to sacrifice the frame size, bit rate, or anything else to get it all onto one disc.

So my query is whether I can duplicate these 3 to 4 hour videos with titles and time codes burned into each frame using FCP X and Compressor? Regardless of the video quality. I'm already pretty sure that iMove and iDVD fail with the menu, time code, and length but I'll listen to any suggestions. If FCP X and Compressor will not do the job are there any other options?

Before I hit the send key, thanks in advance to all those who are going to answer the question I did not ask - which is how bad the video image quality will be. I do not care how bad that quality gets. I understand that. If I can carry some video along that a good thing, but if it takes 2 DVD's to get higher quality video images then I've failed. One disc is the first requirment. Understandable audio is the second requirement. There is no third requirement. In this specific case, better is the enemy of good enough. After I finish a 4 hour DVD let me be the judge whether enough video information still exists and whether to save some effort and do the audio only disc. Thanks.

Compressor, Mac OS X (10.7.5)

Posted on Feb 12, 2013 4:12 PM

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Answer 1

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Russ H

Level 7

22,432 points

Feb 12, 2013 6:01 PM in response to lowellb

Sorry, you're not going to get an MPEG2 out of Compressor that will hold 4 hours on a single layer disk.

Try an MP1, since you don't need quality…perhaps at about 1.3 Mbps.

Do a short test to see.

Russ

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Answer 2

lowellb Author

Level 1

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Aug 12, 2013 11:47 AM in response to Russ H

Thanks for your suggestion.

I've continued to debug my process. I am still running Lion, eyeTV recording export to mpg, now using Compressor to create Time Code burned in with an output m2t file, and then to Visual Hub for DVD image creation. As needed I can do some sound clean up in Compressor so my videos sometimes have better audio than originally broadcast.

From the Media Inspector my .m2t file looks like this:

Output is .m2t

Demuxer: LAVF

Track Info: 1 audio & 1 video track

Format: MPG@ 12000.0kbps, 720x480, 30fps

MPEG-1/2, 384.0kbps, 48.0kHz 32bit, 2 channels

If I need to do more video editing I use iMovie to create a single m4v output file, convert that to mp4 using StreamClip, and then run that through Compressor for adding the Time Code. It ends up the looking the same.

Last month I created a 3 Hr 58 Min video on one single layer DVD-R using this process.

Thats the longest one so far using Compressor and Visual Hub. To my aging ears the sound was as good as the original and the video was still quite good. The only video quality issues occurred when the camera panned the scene the DVD movie would very noticable stutter images. Even that was acceptable as the camera only pans occasionally and then stops.This is not an action film showing in your nearest Cineplex.

Visual Hub eventually blows up somewhere over 3 - 1/2 hours depending on the activity in the video. But the magic of Visual Hub is that most of my video recordings end up on a single disk. This is a tremendous feature for lower quality bulk archiving.

I'll be investigating using MP1 for doing audio on a DVD for those few that fail this process. I've got a few video recordings since January 2013 that now run close to 6 hours and I think even the audio might not fit a single DVD. And without the Time Code this audio becomes harder to search if you are on a regular DVD player and not a computer.

I'm still locked into Lion as Visual Hub is obsolete and no further updates will be made. When my last Lion machine fails I am out of business using this process. Maybe by that time I can make the case that these will no longer be viewed on a home DVD player but only on Computers with DVD drives. I could try and see how much compression I can do to reduce the mpg file size to a reasonable number of GB and I won't need to do the Time Code as the computer movie player will typically provide that.

I'm hoping that some other source of a Visual Hub knock-off or other App with similar DVD compression capabilities will show up.

Lowell

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