Software or hardware encoding for project?

[stantheman1976]

I'm working on a graduation video for my wife's school. It will include the graduation ceremony we filmed along with various activities from the school year. The comencement ceremony will be about 1 1/2 hours and other footage could be up to an hour. The whole thing has to be 1 disc. I tried to talk them into 2 for quality's sake but people who don't do this kind of thing aren't interested in that argument.



I have a Philips DVD recorder that I've always been pleased with the quality at 2 1/2-3 hours setings. I normally use TMPGEnc Plus 2.5 for encoding and have always been satisfied with it but I've never done a single disc project this large. So what's my best bet? Output it as a single AVI and encode 2 pas VBR with TMPGEnc or figure the entire length, set my DVD recorder for that quality, and fill up a disc and reauthor on PC?

[redwudz]

I would lean toward using the DVD recorder myself. One reason is they usually do some filtering that cleans up the video a bit or at least seems to make it look better. If you don't like the results, you can always go to TMPGEnc.

How many copies will you end up making? That could be another whole problem.

[stantheman1976]

If I use the DVD recorder I'll record the difference segments, rip to hard drive with DVD Decrypter in whole pieces, cut and convert to MPEG-2 with Womble MPEG2VCR, and author with DVD Lab. Then I'll just burn copies from the hard drive. I don't know how many copies they've sold yet. I was guaranteed a minimum of 50.