Creating movies in Pinnacle Studio 11

[kadavil]

I am using Pinnacle Studio 11 for my video editing. This weekend I was trying to edit a 2 1/2 hr video of an event. When I try to write on DVD (4.5GB), as an DVD format, best quality, I am only able to write 68 mins of the video. How is it that commercial movies which are longer and higher quality fit on the same 4.5 GB disk? Is there anything I can do to fit more on the same disk?

I am a newbee in this area and would like some advice from Pinnace users.

Thanks in advance

[edDV]

I am using Pinnacle Studio 11 for my video editing. This weekend I was trying to edit a 2 1/2 hr video of an event. When I try to write on DVD (4.5GB), as an DVD format, best quality, I am only able to write 68 mins of the video. How is it that commercial movies which are longer and higher quality fit on the same 4.5 GB disk? Is there anything I can do to fit more on the same disk?

I am a newbee in this area and would like some advice from Pinnace users.

Thanks in advance

"Best Quality" will fill a single side DVD-5 disc in 68 min. If you still want "best" and one disc, you will need to go to dual layer DVD-9 media. Or you can lower quality on a single layer.

[Nelson37]

The first piece of advice would be to use something other than Pinnacle for this type of work.

Anything, anything at all would be better. You need better bitrate control, for one thing. Look under the Tools section, lots of free progs that are much, much better. Start with Virtualdub, then HCenc, also Avisynth, Megui, XVID4PSP, lots of better tools.

The Pinnacle software is just about the worst there is. I have heard that version 11 is at least functional, but bitrate control of good, better, best just is not going to cut it.

[jagabo]

Commercial movies usually come on dual layer discs. So they have ~twice as much space to work with. They don't start out with noisy, shakey, interlaced 30 fps camcorder footage which is harder to compress. And they also don't use Pinnacle Studio.

[filmboss80]

Those who make high quality, commercial movies don't use Pinnacle Studio. Multipass, variable bitrate encoding is essential for maximizing quality while economizing file size. I don't think your software offers a lot in terms of encoder customization. As Nelson37 said, there are better tools. Plus, when you're dealing with a 2.5 hour video, you need to think about DVD-9 media, as edDV said.

EDIT: I was writing this as Jagabo posted. Sorry for the redundancy.

[kadavil]

Thanks to all of you for your suggestions and comments. I will certainly checkout some of the software.

Thanks again.
kadavil