Problems burning with MyDVD

[ccm]

Hello,
I have captured an analog video, from a VCR, and am attempting to now burn it from my hard drive to the DVD disk. I have been able to burn several other DVD's going from my DV camcorder to my PC then burning via MyDVD. I am not able to burn the analog capture and I believe it is because the file is larger than the DVD will hold. The videos I captured from my DV camcorder were only one hour long and they filled the DVD. The analog captures are a little over two hours long which is more than the DVD will hold. I have tried everthing I know of to split the analog but have had no luck. I guess I could recapture the anlalog file again and not capture more than one hour in each file but this would be a royal pain since I would have to stay with the PC the whole time to be sure it did not over run the time limit.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

[thecoalman]

Let's back it up a little so you get on the right track. There's 3 or 4 basic steps depending on what route you take. The first is the most important because that dictates what you do afterwards.

1. Capture (transfer for DV-AVI)

The format you capture in is important. If you capture or transfer your footage as DVD compliant MPEG2 you pretty much are stuck with the filesize you have. Reencoding MPEG2 generally will not produce as good a end product than if you have captured in AVI. It will save you time though.

AVI capture is a lot less compressed, for example DV-AVI the native format that is on tape for your DV cam is about 14GB per hour. It's also a better format to edit. One last thing to note is to make sure if you captured your footage in MPEG2 format that you software supports only encoding the parts where you have made edits.


2. Edit

Speaks for itself.


3. Encode

If you have captured or transferred you footage as AVI you need to convert it too DVD compliant MPEG2. From here the bitrate dtermines the file size, lowering the bitrate will produce smaller filesizes but will also reduce quality. You can fit many hours of video on a 4.7 DVD at a very low quality. Generally I try a nd stick with 1.5 hours.

If you have captured as MPEG2 you should have determined the bitrate before capturing it to insure you have enough space. Again reencoding MPEG2 to a lower bitrate can be done but video should only be encoded to MPEG2 once if possible.

There's a calculator here for determining the bitrate to use. https://www.videohelp.com/calc.htm

4. Author & Burn

From here you set your chapter points menus etc and burn away.....


Now some of these steps may not even be evident to you depending on the software your using. They can even overlap, just for example I load my DV-AVI into my editor, edit it... the editing term here is used loosely because nothing is really done to the source files.... and output my edits to a new MPEG2 to be used in my authoring program.

[ghoster]

dose my dvd still convert the audio to pcm or lpcm? if so that could be your problem....

[ccm]

Ghostger,
How can I tell if it convert the audio to pcm or lpcm?

Thanks