Running out of room on DVD+R/RW

[JoelRC]

I recently purchased a HP 200e DVD burner to copy my home movies to DVD. The DVDs state that the DVD will hold up to 2 hours of video, but I'm only able to get 1 hour of video on the DVD. I have a Sony digital 8 video camera and use Pinnacle Studio to capture and edit the movie. I then use Sonic MyDVD to burn the AVI file to the DVD. How can I get 2 hours on the DVD?

Thanks,
Joel

[DJRumpy]

You need to reduce the Bit Rate of the movie, which will reduce it's size at the cost of some quality (probably unnoticable). Optionally, you can encode using VBR if your encoder software supports it. You can also dumb down the audio bitrate to save some space, but the gains there are usually negligable for home video.

You can also try encoding in a smaller resolution, which can nearly double the amount of video that will fit on a DVD.

352x240, and 352x480 are both supported by DVD. Your probably encoding at 720x480.

[JoelRC]

Thanks for the tips. How much difference will changing the resolution make?

[bugster]

Another thing that will help save space. MyDvd converts all audio to PCM which is uncompressed and takes up loads of room. Try a different DVD authoring package that supports mp2 audio or even AC3. Mp2 is supported by the Ulead products (I believe) and Dazzle DVD compleate amonst others.

Hope this helps