Newbie needing general assistance

[jeffh123]

I have just recently purchased a Pioneer A06 DVD Writer. With it came Pinnacle Studio (v8 Special Edition) and Expression. This was to transfer 3hr VHS tapes to DVD.

Up until now the whole thing has been a total disaster. A 3hr tape was captured to MPEG (about 8Gbyte) and I was informed that Studio could only write 2 hours to a DVD. I’ve tried reducing the quality but Studio still complains about this 2 hours. The parameters associated with AVI are Compression, Width, Height, Frame rate and Kbytes/sec. For MPEG the parameters are Width, Height and Kbits/sec.

Does anyone know what these parameters should be set to, to get a decent quality image and 3 hours on a DVD. How do they combine to give a particlar mpeg or avi file size, or more importantly the resulting ifo, bup and vob file size after the mpeg/avi file has been converted for writing to a 4.7 Gb DVD.

I did cut down the mpeg file to 1.5 hours and started to convert it for a trial write to a DVD-RW. I commenced the MPEG to ifo/bup/vob transformation process and judging by the rate the progress bar was moving I estimated that the whole exercise was going to take about 16 Hrs. I have a 2 GHz machine and I thought this was double-plus ridiculous.

Are there any freebie bits of software that will do this process a bit quicker than this ?

I am at square one with this, can anyone get me moving ?

[Richard_G]

Your profile doesn't say where you are so I don't know if you are in the US (NTSC land) or Europe (PAL).

To get three hours on a DVD you need to either reduce your bitrate considerably but keep your resolution in full size and end up with pretty poor quality, or reduce both to keep the file sizes down and quality up. It is the bitrate that dictates the file size but if you reduce the bitrate and leave the resolution the same you compress the video enormously and end up with something that looks horrible. VHS is pretty poor quality anyway (compared with DVD), so you can reduce the frame size from full DVD resolution to what is termed half D1 with hardly any noticable loss in quality. As you only have half as much image you can compress it to half the size. Half D1 keeps the vertical resolution the same but halves the horizontal. If you are going to be editing before converting, capture in avi. If you are going to be doing straight conversion, capture in MPEG.

If PAL, instead of full DVD resolution (720 x 576) change to 352 x 576. 25 frames per second, bit rate at 3500kbs. This will give you just over 3 hours per DVD disk .

If NTSC use 352 x 480, 29.97 fps, 3500 kbs.

If you capture straight to MPEG using these settings and leave at these settings when you convert, it shouldn't take much more than the runtime to do the conversion.

Good luck and welcome to the bottom of a very steep learning curve.