is 3 hours to long to burn an hour of video on a dvd?

[brimx]

hi,

i went on a trip and recorded tons of 1 hour tapes that id like to put on dvd.

i captured the video with adobe premiere and saved it as an avi. each video is 1 hour long and is about 12 gigs in size. ive used ulead dvd workshop to burn an hour of video on a dvd which tells me that i hardly have any space left. (shouldnt i be able to put another hour?) anyways, i burn the single avi to the dvd-r with no menus, navigation, etc.... and it sits on my pc and takes about 3 or 4 hours in order to do everything its gotta do and then finally burns it.

is this normal??

is 3 or 4 hours the average time it takes to burn a 1 hour avi to a dvd? ive never really worked with dvd and videos before so im not too familiar. but please help me out! also, i dont think its my computer's capabilities because its an athlon xp 1900 with 768 of ddr ram. 250 gb hdd. and i make sure no programs are running simultaneously.

please let me know, and if possible give me some more suggestions for dvd authoring programs!

thanks!

[hwoodwar]

It is not taking three hours to burn to DVD. Most of the time used the program is converting AVI to MPEG-2 format. MPEG-2 video format is what is used on DVDs. I have never used Ulead DVD Workshop, but based on my experience with TMPGEnc, 3-4 hours (depending upon the internal settings) sounds resonable.

[maek]

Okey dokey...first, I don't know what your computer profile is (processor speed, etc.), but I can tell you at 1st glance that it may not be altogether unreasonable.

If anything that I say is incorrect, there are many others on this site who will correct me.

First, you have to consider that you captured an AVI. In order for you to make a DVD, it first has to re-encode the AVI file into a DVD-compliant MPEG-2 video. In the best of worlds, this video rendering does take considerable time.

Second, your question about putting another hour on a DVD. Yes, it's possible. Keep in mind that you are letting Ulead encode at the highest bitrate, which usually equates to approximately 1 hour on a DVD with uncompressed audio. There are several ways that you can squeeze more:

• - encode the video at a lower bitrate, or better yet, a VARIABLE bitrate that selects which parts need higher bitrates than others. TMPGENC, although a slow encoder, is excellent for this purpose, but you'll need to buy it if you intend to encode MPEG-2 files (for DVDs). This may impact quality, but you'll have to experiment to find a happy medium. Typically, I find limiting videos to about 2 hours for a 4.7 (4.38GB) DVD works just fine.
  - encode the audio using Dolby Digital or MPEG-1 Layer II. You won't find any noticeable loss in audio quality, done properly, and it affords you some considerable space as well...maybe not to the degree of a variable bitrate for video, but you can cut your audio files to 1/3 of an uncompressed WAV file. I don't know if Ulead will accept Dolby Digital audio files or not. A free encoder (look under tools) for converting .wav, etc. files to Dolby Digital is called ffmpeggui.
  
  I hope this helps. You'll probably have to search around the forum and/or tools, but I'm sure others will chip in.

[solarfox]

DVD Workshop actually has several different templates which can be selected at the final stage of the project, including templates with VBR video and MPEG audio. (It will warn you that "MPEG audio is not a standard for NTSC DVD's" -- which in theory is true, but I've never yet encountered a DVD player that couldn't cope with MPEG audio tracks.) You can also modify these templates and define your own desired bitrates (for both audio and video tracks) if you want to have finer control over the results -- at the final stage, click on "Make Disc", then look down at the bottom of the list of options where it says "Customize."

If you elect to use an external encoder such as TMPGenc, remember that you must check the "Do not convert compliant files" option in the "Make Disc" dialog, or else DVDWS will try to re-encode them again to match the selected template.

To get two hours onto a DVD, I find that a setting of 5000Kbps VBR for the video, and 128Kbps MPEG audio, yields quite acceptable results for most purposes. If your programme is music-heavy, such as a concert video or other such event, you might bump the audio track up to 160Kbps or 192Kbps -- I don't see any real reason to go beyond this, or mess with Dolby Digital; your average camcorder microphones just aren't that great.

As for the encoding time, well... that depends on your system. Even my XP2000+ system will take about an hour or so to encode an hour of video from DV-type-1 AVI to MPEG-2 -- and that's with 512Mb of RAM, three physical hard drives (one for the OS/Applications, one for the "raw" video captures, and one for the MPEG's to be saved to), and no other processes running. If yours is a slower CPU, or has less physical memory, or you're doing everything on a single physical hard drive, or you're trying to do other things while it encodes in the background, then 3-4 hours might not be out of line.

[brimx]

wow,

i appreciate the great amount of helpful replies! i was just confused about what i should do with the avi file that i get from adobe? should i capture it as an mpeg 2 ? or should i take the 12 gig avi file and try to re-encode it? i dont have an audio and video file because adobe put them together. im gonna try to use tmpgenc and see what i can do!

thanks guys!

[maek]

Ultimately, it depends upon what you want to do with the captured video. If you intend to do some editing, capturing as an AVI is a good way to keep the video quality loss to a minimum. Typically you'll find that some video software will try re-encoding the file again anyway, although I'm not sure about Ulead.

If the AVI files are too large for your taste, you can always use a compression algorithm like HuffyUV to keep the size down, but minimize compression loss.

Lordsmurf has a good guide regarding capturing AVI versus MPEG-2: http://www.digitalfaq.com/capture/avivsmpeg.htm.

Happy authoring!

[brimx]

thanks m8! i appreciate ur help. ill take a look at it and see what i can do!

thanks again!

[DaveS]

what is your source (analog vhs, digital, etc.) (assume NTSC? what country are you in)

if you captured at 720x480 (=full D1), you can resize to half D1 (352x480) and your bits (e.g. bitrate) will go alot futher.

you would do this when coverting your file from avi to mpeg.

using the bit rate calc (VideoHelp Bitrate calculator), 3 hours of video would need a bitrate of about 3100 (kbps) to fit. at that bitrate, it should loke fine in half d1 if it was analog vhs source (assuming a 'regular' size TV, etc.). this assumes 192kbps for your audio and a 'standard' abount of space for your menus, etc.

let us know how your project goes & good luck...