How best to fit 2hr mpeg2 into 800mb cdrom?

[duet]

Hi, I'm a newbie. I've captured a huge avi from a NTSC vhs tape using Canapos ADVC-100 at 720x480. The program I use is Adobe Premiere 6.5. I converted to mpeg2 for svcd burning using the Premiere. Then, stupid me realise that the mpeg2 file is too big to burn into svcd. What is the best thing I should have done?

a. Should I cut the big avi into right size so that after converting to mpeg2, it can fit into svcd? If this is the case, how do I know how to cut (by time or data space -- how to calculate?)

b. Or should I cut the mpeg2 file? If so which software?

I really hope to get a reply on this soon. I've searched the How To, Forums, Authoring and I don't seem to find what I'm looking for.

[trillium]

VirtualDubMod I believe has the capability of splitting MPEG2 files.
I know there is a guide around here somewhere on using VDub to split avis, so with Mod (once you get the MPEG2 loaded) it would work much the same. Check in the guides section for VirtualDub related guides (I wish I could help but I can't find the link!)

[puertorican138]

VirtualDubMod I believe has the capability of splitting MPEG2 files.
I know there is a guide around here somewhere on using VDub to split avis, so with Mod (once you get the MPEG2 loaded) it would work much the same. Check in the guides section for VirtualDub related guides (I wish I could help but I can't find the link!)

VirtualDubMod can't cut MPEG-2 without re-encoding back to an AVI. TMPGEnc can cut MPEG-2 and still keep it as a MPEG-2 once you save out a new file.

[duet]

Thanks for the replies. But, is quality better if I split the AVI first and then encode into mpeg2 or is it better to split the mpeg2 file? How do know how to split -- by timing or by file size and how to calculate?

I'm still lost. I do hope you guys can help shed some light. I can't seem to find answers anywhere else in the site.

[puertorican138]

Thanks for the replies. But, is quality better if I split the AVI first and then encode into mpeg2 or is it better to split the mpeg2 file? How do know how to split -- by timing or by file size and how to calculate?

I'm still lost. I do hope you guys can help shed some light. I can't seem to find answers anywhere else in the site.

You should split the AVI first and then encode into MPEG-2. Cutting MPEG-2 leads to a lot of off-sync problems with most users.

[ZippyP.]

But, is quality better if I split the AVI first and then encode into mpeg2 or is it better to split the mpeg2 file? How do know how to split -- by timing or by file size and how to calculate?

Quality of the product does not depend on when you split. A typical 80 min cd-rom will hold 800Mb of SVCD data (mode2). This can be anywhere from 35-60 minutes of good quality SVCD-video depending on the bitrate used by the encoder. What determines the filesize is the bitrate (bits per second) and the video length.

I use TMPGEnc as my encoder. In it you can specify the bitrate at which to encode (as well as the encoding method). This affects the video quality as well as the amount of video that can be put on one disk. As well, in TMPGEnc you can specify which portion of the video to encode, so splitting becomes unnecessary. It also does batch encoding so that an entire movie is encoded into 2 or more files in one go. I don't know if Premier has any of these functions.

There are bitrate calculators in the Tools section to help figure out filesize. You may find them useful or you may just want to split your avi by time before converting in Premier. If you go the 2nd method, it might be a bit of trial and error at first to find the most time that you can use to fill a CD. I would guess that you've been using the SVCD maximum bitrate which would put about 35 mins. on one CD.

Hope that helps without confusing things too much.

[duet]

Hi all and especially Zippy!

Thanks for the advice. I now use Premiere to capture AVI. And then preview it using TMPEG to determine the range of frames to capture so that it can fit into a 800mb disk. Managed to do it safely and toggle with the bitrate stuff to 'auto' after setting disk size. It's quite easy to encode nicely into a mpeg-2 that fits into a 800mb disk. I also use 2-pass with motion search set to high quality.

My challenge now is to create a menu and chapters. Is VCDEasy the way to go?

From: Halley, Singapore

[ZippyP.]

Glad you got it worked out. You might want to try a search on menus/chapters or start another thread on that, sorry I can't help. 8)