Good guide on how to convert video to dvd compliant format ??.

[iosman]

Hello,


I am looking for a guide that would help me go convert any video file format in a 0x80070490 format that would be dvd compliant. I try to find one in the guide section but it seem that there is so much but i did not find one that would go through this step by step.
Do you have any recommandation for a newbie ?

thanks
iosman

[manono]

Use AvsToDVD. There are guides to its use halfway down its page.

[johnmeyer]

Quick version: you render the video to MPEG-2 format; you render the audio to AC-3 or WAV format. You then put this video and audio into a DVD authoring program to actually create the DVD.

The MPEG-2 video should be rendered at a bitrate between 4,000,000 and 8,000,000 bits per second. You can go outside these boundaries, but if you go too low, the video quality suffers, and if you go more than about 8,500,000 bits per second (the maximum depends on how many bits are used by audio and other things on the DVD, like subtitles), your DVD may not be compliant with the spec. You can fit about 70 minutes of video onto a single-layer DVD at 8,000,000 bits per second, and double that if you go down to 4,000,000 bits per second.

You can render the MPEG-2 using constant bitrate or variable bitrate. You can render in one pass or, for low bitrates, you can improve quality by doing a two- or three-pass encode.

[lordsmurf]

Quick version: you render

No, not "render". The correct term "encode".
"Render" actually means something else entirely, although it's misused quite a bit.

When researching how-to/guides/etc, it makes a huge difference.

[johnmeyer]

Quick version: you render

No, not "render". The correct term "encode".
"Render" actually means something else entirely, although it's misused quite a bit.

When researching how-to/guides/etc, it makes a huge difference.

Technically this is correct, but it also introduces unneeded confusion into this thread. The reason that it is confusing is that the option to create MPEG-2 is labeled "Render As" in many NLEs."

This is true of ALL versions of Vegas Pro: if I want to create an MPEG-2 file, I go to the Vegas Pro "File" menu and select the "Render As" option.

There is no menu or option labeled "encode."

Just to be clear, encoding is the act of taking each frame of video, along with the audio, and creating the stream of bits that becomes the MPEG-2, MP4, AVI, or MOV video file (there are dozens of other formats, of course). By contrast, rendering is the act of combining different elements together to create each frame of video. Thus, rendering happens first, before you encode, although you don't have to render if you are doing a simple "cuts-only" edit, in which case you simply encode. A simple example of rendering is overlaying a transparent title on top of an existing video. Once this is done, the next step is to encode it into a video file, as I just described.

Rendering can become incredibly complex, involving dozens of different videos, effects, and complicated mathematical operations which change with each frame of video. Encoding involves lots of calculations, but is the same operation for every frame of video, just doing the same thing over and over and over and over again. Encoding to a lossy codec like MPEG-2 or h.264 MP4 permanently degrades the video, introducing artifacts. You therefore want to do this only once, if possible.

Again, the reason this is a somewhat pedantic difference and is not really needed in this discussion is that most people's NLEs do both of these operations at the same time: you have multiple video and audio files, along with all sorts of effects and transitions, and when you like what you have created, you press a button and the NLE both renders and encodes at the same time. Most people refer to this single operation as rendering, and I suggest that we continue to do the same here because doing so will not lead anyone to do the wrong thing, and not understanding the difference really doesn't matter because to "convert video to DVD compliant format" (the title of this thread) will require the person to select the "Render As" option in Vegas (and perhaps other NLEs).

The one place where this distinction IS important is when you create a workflow where you need to do multiple renders before creating your final delivery video, usually in MP4 format these days. In that case, you want to avoid doing more than one encode, because each encode degrades the video further. In this case you save the video to uncompressed, where no encoding is involved, at least not in the usual sense of that word. After you have done your various renders, one after another, you eventually take the final product and encode that, possibly doing one more render at the same time.