Quality and capacity of DVD-r ? (DV to DVD, Pinnacle St 8)

[NicholasA]

Using Pinnicale Studio 8,
I captured Hi8 (played in a sony Dig8) thru the IE1394 port, saved as DV.
Edited My "home movies" then Burn to DVD-r.
it only allows Me 60 min per DVD-r at 100% quality.
I am burning these to DVD, to save them, for future generations.
Question:
I thought DVD's held 2 hours of video ?, is this at much less than 100% ?

If video is captured from Hi8 into Dv, edited and burnt to DVD, what quality level must it be burnt at as to not loose ANY quality ? and Digital8 ?

Many Thanks,
Nick

[musher70]

What is 100% quality anyway?
thats like 8000kps video bit rate

dvd's are more like 5000kps average
unless they use vbr...

If you got 8mm, at sp mode, quality should be
good enough at 4000 i think, use some rw 's
and experiment i guess...

[netman]

I am having the same problems. I use Pinnacle and really like the program but the quality isnt there.

netman

[pb]

Archiving to mpeg2 on DVD will not give the same qualityas DV/D8/Hi8 on tape. All you could hope for iks the best quality to watch on a DVD player. If you are trying to backup tapes I would save as DV on a PC and copyas DV avi to DVD, you would probably get about 19 minutes per DVD.

[ItsMe]

When I use Pinnacle Studio (version 7) with the "default" DVD setting, 6000kbps I get aboutabout 1 1/2 hours on one DVD+R. Higher bitrates do not give you noticable improvements in quality. i say "when I use..." because these days, I make my projects to to DV, and then transcode it using my hardware encoder with these settings: VBR, Min 1048400, Average 6000000, Max 8000000. This often gives me 2 hours or more, depending on the amount of motion and camera shake. You try do something similar with a software transcoder such as mpgenc. A setting of 5000000 for the average should also yield good results.

The best way to find out is to create a small project, with different types of footage, and then make the project several times to different bitrates, and then compare the results. Try to include some difficult to encode scenes, such as, cloud sky, grass and trees, camera shake and fast motion.

Archiving to mpeg2 on DVD will not give the same qualityas DV/D8/Hi8 on tape. All you could hope for iks the best quality to watch on a DVD player. If you are trying to backup tapes I would save as DV on a PC and copyas DV avi to DVD, you would probably get about 19 minutes per DVD.

I don't quite agree. If you encode properly you can bearly tell the difference between the final MPEG and the original. I have started backing up whole tapes on DVD+R using high bitrate MPEG2, I don't mean authoring, just copying my MPEG's to the disk. This gives me 1 full tape per DVD+R. If I want to use a particular MPEG, I then transcode back to DV and do the editing. Yes, I know that this is a lossy proccess, but the results are still almost as good as the original. I am doing this because the DVD+R's are much less vunrable than the original tapes. I still keep the tapes though, but if something goes wrong with a tape, I still have a backup on disk.

[donpedro]

it only allows Me 60 min per DVD-r at 100% quality.

This is Pinnacle's Studio 8 fault. They "think" that after they convert to MPEG2 that this will be size that can still fit on one disk. But if you look into disk you can see that there is still a lot of space (DVD-/+R can hold around 4.3GB).

BTW: I like Studio 8. It is easy and menu looks nice. Codec can be better, but as once somebody said, my grandma can't see difference. Importnat is that she can see her grandchild playing in a pool.

[ajrecs]

This is a topic I have been following with much interest, as I have been trying to push the 2-hour barrier myself. I have several long DV sequences, and agree that Studio 8 has problems encoding them. The Make Disk option forces a CBR encoding, which effectively limits you to a tad under 2 hours at lowest quality, 3000 kbps, I think. You can select "Automatic" and it will select a fractional bit rate for you, still not to exceed the 2 hour limit.

If you "Make MPEG" with DVD standards, they say that VBR is used, effectively extending the time constraint without a visible quality hit. From what I've read, and experimented with, that appears to be correct.

You can also use an external encoder, such as TMPGenc, to encode 2-pass VBR (the Studio 8 encode is one-pass VBR), for even better economy of space.

But, although they (the Pinnacle support staff) say that you can then import the VBR MPEG into Studio and burn it, the burning engine reverts to the same CBR parameters, based on time. So if you have a 2:30 movie compressed to 4 Gb with VBR, when you load it into Studio 8 it says it is too long to burn!

I have taken to using Studio 8 to edit the footage together, and create an AVI file. Then TMPGenc with tooLame audio to encode it into a VBR MPEG file. Then IFOedit to author it into VOBs. Then Nero to do the final burn. Lots of steps, but I have a great looking 2:30 piece, and clearly have more room on the DVD.

What I don't have is menus, chapters, features and the like, which I can easily author with Studio 8 but which won't survive the transition elaborated above. And, ultimately, that is what I am after.

Any suggestions, thought, comments, or inspirations would be sincerely appreciated!

[ItsMe]

I am doing something similar but with menu's.

Edit with Pinnacle studio and create the DV AVI.
Use external MPEG transcoder to convert AVI to MPEG, in my case I use the VMagic hardware encoder.
Create the final DVD using Uleads DVD Workshop. This allows me to make (motion) menu's & background music in each menu.

This is one step less and using DVD Workshop is much less complicated than IFOedit as Workshop is wysiwyg.