why burn in anything other than MPEG2 - urgent please

[Y Spencer]

Novice here!

Reading that dvds (pal) are in mpeg2 what other formats can you convert into, and why please?

How do I maximise quality (I am recording in HD)

Thank you

Urgent request as I am trying to free camcorder space up to film child's play tomorrow, and need to get some dvds recorded

[pandy]

Novice here!

Reading that dvds (pal) are in mpeg2 what other formats can you convert into, and why please?

How do I maximise quality (I am recording in HD)

Thank you

Urgent request as I am trying to free camcorder space up to film child's play tomorrow, and need to get some dvds recorded

You can record HD, DVD as a standard doesn't support HD so your material must be converted to SD (PAL max 720x576, NTSC max 720x480) - after conversion to SD from HD quality will be higher than recording source in SD. DVD support only SD MPEG-2 videos.
If you are interested in HD then you need to go for BD.

[hech54]

Urgent request as I am trying to free camcorder space up to film child's play tomorrow, and need to get some dvds recorded

What you are recording is just DATA. Transfer the camcorder material to your computer hard drive or to an external hard drive (via your computer) and delete the data on the camcorder. Viola.....free space to record more.

[Y Spencer]

Thank you both for your replies, and fast too

I am not going blue ray, but good to hear the dvd quality will be better for recording in HD.

I want to get it onto dvd as my original desktop hard drive has failed, I just bought a replacement and this is giving me an error message too!

So do I just convert to mpeg2? is there another way of writing this / file extension , as I can't see it immediately as an option on my convertor?

Is resolution the same as bitrate? If not how do I maximise bitrate , and what should I aim for?

So I need to use 720x576 resolution max? If I use a higher option will it scale it down, or just not work?
If I have to go for 720x576 or less, do both numbers have to be lower

[pandy]

Thank you both for your replies, and fast too

I am not going blue ray, but good to hear the dvd quality will be better for recording in HD.

I want to get it onto dvd as my original desktop hard drive has failed, I just bought a replacement and this is giving me an error message too!

So do I just convert to mpeg2? is there another way of writing this / file extension , as I can't see it immediately as an option on my convertor?

Is resolution the same as bitrate? If not how do I maximise bitrate , and what should I aim for?

So I need to use 720x576 resolution max? If I use a higher option will it scale it down, or just not work?
If I have to go for 720x576 or less, do both numbers have to be lower

It iwll be better to answer for those questions if you can provide small sample of your source.

Generally your HD source need to be deinterlaced (if it is not progressive), after deinterlacing video need to be resized to target resolution (for 16:9 content it is recommended to use or 720 or 704 horizontal resolution, vertical resolution is always for PAL 576 lines and for NTSC 480 lines), after resizing video need to be reinterlaced and after those steps is ready to be encoded (compressed) by MPEG-2 encoder. If you need additional video proecessing this may be silghtly different order but generally deinterlace is first step and reinterlace is last step in processing chain.

[jagabo]

So do I just convert to mpeg2?

Why convert at all? Any recompression is just going to lower the quality. I highly recommend against converting to movie DVDs (ie, DVDs that play in a standard DVD player) just to save space. To save space on your computer, or to back up your videos, you can burn them onto DVD media as data. You just need to break them up into <4.3 GB files for single layer DVD, <8.5 GB files for double layer DVDs. And DVD media is notoriously unreliable so you need to make at least two copies (three ore more better) of anything you don't want to lose. And you need to check those copies regularly -- if any is going bad burn a new DVD from the remaining good one.

But if you need to make movie DVDs your video must be converted to DVD specifications. For PAL DVD that's: 720x576, 25 fps, MPEG 2 video at less than 9800 kbps; AC3/MP2/uncompressed audio. If you use uncompressed audio the the video bitrate has to be lower as the maximum total bitrate allowed on DVD is 10080 kbps.

Is resolution the same as bitrate?

No. In this context resolution is the frame size. Presumably you're shooting at 1920x1080 -- and reducing the frame size to 720x576 for DVD. You will be losing a lot of resolution. The final result will not be as sharp as the original video when watched on TV. Bitrate is the amount of data per unit time allocated to the video, usually expressed as Kbits or Mbits per second. The more you compress, the lower the bitrate. To get that lower bitrate the encoder will throw away more detail.

If not how do I maximise bitrate

Select the bitrate in your encoding software. Or, if it uses "quality" based encoding, select a higher quality. At 9800 kbps (plus a little for the audio) you can only fit about 1 hour of video on a single layer DVD.

and what should I aim for?

It depends on your source and your destination. If you want to put more than one hour on a single layer DVD you'll have to use proportionally less bitrate. But amateur handheld camcorder video doesn't compress as well so I would avoid much more than an hour on a DVD. And nobody is going to want watch more than an hour of your home videos at a time anyway.

So I need to use 720x576 resolution max?

For DVD? Yes.

If I use a higher option will it scale it down, or just not work?

It will not work on DVD. DVD authoring software will not let you author a disc with more than that resolution. And if you somehow manged to author a disc with higher resolution it would not play in a normal DVD player.

If I have to go for 720x576 or less, do both numbers have to be lower

For PAL DVD the frame size must be 720x576, 704x576, 352x576, or 352x288.

[Y Spencer]

small sample of your source. - do you mean a film clip?

I only have a mac working now as my windows pc has crashed (hence all my queries); I haven't had answers in the mac forum so far, and these queries seem generic, so hope this forum is ok.
I now find when importing the series of clips gets dumped into a single avchd file. and the mac convertor

[Y Spencer]

thank you jagabo - that's a really good explanation - publish it - loads would find it useful

[pandy]

small sample of your source. - do you mean a film clip?

Yes, without small sample you can have only general answers like those provided by Jagabo.

From my side 9800kbps is somehow maximum bitrate feasible in theory by DVD - in real life i would rather target it as max bitrate and for average bitrate would go for something smaller - with good quality MPEG-2 encoder typical bitrate can be around 5000 - 6000kbps (i.e. 5 - 6Mbps).
Amateur videos are usually more difficult to compress due higher noise level but in your case HD source may give better quality after conversion to DVD (noise level will be reduced), additionally denoising may be performed before resizing to DVD to further improve compressibility of video without sacrificing too many details.