Squeezing more than 2 hours of video onto a DVD?

Compressor has DVD presets for 150 min...that's 2 hours, 30 min.

Shane's suggestion should meet your needs.

The more you squeeze onto a DVD the lower the quality as the bit rate has to be reduced, however there will be no dramatic change, it just gets slightly worse and this mainly shows up in areas of motion.

Regarding iDVD, although the manual says the maximum is 2 hours you can often squeeze quite a lot more on . . . . . possibly close to 2h 30m as long as you don't have multiple complex menus etc.

If you're "replicating" the dvd (creating a glass master and pressing the dvd's) you can create a dual layer dvd in dvdsp and easily get 4 hrs of high quality material onto a dvd. You can burn dual layer dvd's directly on your mac if your dvd burner is capable of this, however playback willl be problematic on many systems.

Hi

Squees in more - without quality loss. No I don't think so

alt is to use DL-DVDs (with all problem involved - even to burn it and more so to play-back)

• Brand

• Type - never ever +/-RW

• BURN SPEED

alt.2 - Roxio Toast™ - that can sqees in up to 10 hours onto a SL-DVD - BUT TO A QUALITY that is really bad (when 10 hours). Normal lengths are from really Good to OK (60 min to 150 min)

alt.3 - Store Your movie onto an USB-memory - Many flat screen TVs and Projectors can playback from these = NO time limit - NO Quality loss

Yours Bengt W

Tom

There are a few ways to approach this, and depending on the type of footage you are using, results may vary.

The "Standard" settings that many encoders default to target about 2 hours on a DVD-5 . (http://dvdstepbystep.com/faqs_7.php)

A calculator is here http://www.videohelp.com/calc.htm

Anyway, depending on the type of footage (race cars vs a speech http://dvdstepbystep.com/faqs_4.php) you may get by with lower encoding rates. It is also a function of the quality of the initial footage. Also audio can be compressed. Take a look here http://dvdstepbystep.com/fasttrackover.php at step 4 for the settings for audio.

Generally 2 pass VBR will give you better results since it will do a better job of using the rate to allocate to places where they are needed, though some footage works better with CBR.

Lastly, it is usually easier to export a self contained movie from Final Cut to run through Compressor as oppossed to sending from Final Cut to Compressor. Often I may try a couple of encodes to see how to tweak the most out of footage and it is quicker to send a self contained.

Bottom line is that 2-1/2 hours is often easily doable, subject to the caveats I mentioned above.

STOP PRESS!

Note that if you put it through Compressor you will not be able to use the resulting files in iDVD.

The Compressor DVD presets are for DVD Studio Pro and similar authoring apps.

In my limited editing experience I have not come across any film that could not be shortened to advantage except perhaps for this one https://vimeo.com/20645306

What about burning it on 2 DVDs?

This way you could probably use iDVD's "Best Performance" setting which will give quality second to none as it encodes everything at the highest bit rate possible for a DVD.

All the fancy VBR and multipass encoding techniques employed in DVDSP etc. are simply ways of making the best of a bad thing . . . DVDs of over 70 minutes duration.

dvdstudiopro is pretty simple if you don't need/want to go into complicated authoring.

Compresssor will produce an m2v and ac3 files which you import into dvdsp and drag into a track and make the track the "first play." Menus aren't particularly complicated if you decide you want them.

A few weeks ago my film making club was "treated" to a number of videos including several "how-to" types.

I believe one was on painting . . . can't remember whether it was oils or water.

They were like watching paint dry . . . . . the demonstrator was using constant repitition which could have been reduced dramatically without detriment to the tuition.

The problem most of us (amateurs) have is that we are too involved with our films and can't view them in a detached way as others do.

Whilst editing we feel that it is essential to include x, y and z but if we come back to those films a few weeks later when we can view them in a more unbiased way we can often see that large amounts of the video are unnecessary.

It can be useful to get a second opinion from someone unconnected with the film.

What about posting a 5 minute section on Vimeo/Youtube so that other editors could assess it and make comments as to whether it would be possible to trim sections and if so where and how?

yes you can have has many links on a menu page as you want (and that will be readable, etc).

Do not let DVD Studio Pro intimidate you 😉 It is fairly straightforward

http://dvdstepbystep.com/fasttrackover.php has all the steps (I mentioned just the audio) There is also a link to a movie showing things

Standard Def video with the low motion you describe should work fine on one DVD. It sounds like you are describing basically a still frame other than limited movement where you are moving the brush or speaking to the camera. If the background of the entire frame is simple (such as a dim room black background) it will make it even better.

CBR sometimes can be a good choice for things like text. May be worth a whirl on testing here also.

You also mentioned that you are distributing the DVDs. Are you having them replicated or just burning copies? If going to replication, DVD-DL is an option. (Replicated discs you have no issues. Even burning copies of DVD-DL should not present many issues with good media and using -R. Some older or some bargain machines may have issues, but it is not quite the problem it was 7 years ago or so.)

I would try to get it on one DVD as mentioned. Based on your description 2-1/2 hours should be easy to do and worth savings in time and costs later on. You can even take a look at other encoders, such as bitVice.

http://www.innobits.com/bitvice.html

There is a free demo. I have used this encoder often and it is a good one.

As Michael mentioned, you can have a bunch of links on a menu. If it is a 4:3, the Maximum number of buttons is 36, 16:9 12 or 18. You should take a good look at the menus and test on DVDs/TVs, after a certain point text can start breaking up and become difficult to read. There are a few tricks there to try. You may want break things into a couple of menus so people can select what is going on by general topic (Oils, Water Color, Brush Selection or something that makes more sense than that 😉 ) There are also some times where DVD SP may or may not compress things again

Take a look at this thread

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/2385632?tstart=0

I had a couple of more things to keep in mind there. You can also encode a movie for a menu outside of DVD SP using CBR.