Your Standards of Quality for Backups (Minutes)

[Acolyte]

A standard DVD5 is 120 minutes?....how many minutes over are you willing to go to get acceptable quality?

[Gazorgan]

That's a false assumption. I have DVD5's that have both Widescreen and Standard on the same disk(no, they are not flippers, straight DVD5).

120 minutes isn't valid. You can't assume that based on anything. Based on max bitrate you can get 58 minutes of pure video, with no room for Audio. Throw in some 2 channel AC3 and you can get maybe 50 minutes/DVD on max rates. If you have seveal AC5.1 and a DTS track then you could have less than 35 minutes of Video.

Flip this the other way, you can easily get 3 hours of video and a single AC5.1 soundtrack on a DVD5 with no loss in quality.

[Acolyte]

I am talking here about bare bones, movie only and single ac51...

[housepig]

A standard DVD5 is 120 minutes?....how many minutes over are you willing to go to get acceptable quality?

depends on the source material - some animation can be effectively presented as 1/2 D1 with a lower bitrate.

if I have a clean source, I will put less minutes on a disc in an effort to preserve the quality. if my source is iffy (VHS at EP, for example) I will pack a bit more time on the disc if necessary.

(ie if I have a 3 hour video on EP VHS, I will put it all on one disc, rather than splitting it over two 90 minute discs, as the increased bitrate will not add to the quality that's already lacking)

[Gurm]

The "minutes" thing is a convention that was adopted by the makers of set-top DVD recorders.

When they say there's "120 minutes" on a DVD, they are essentially saying that the average set-top recorder, using its average bitrate, can put around 120 minutes onto a blank DVD.

Professionally recorded DVD's vary widely in bitrate - and since they are compressed and encoded by professional equipment, they can often achieve excellent results with much lower bitrates.

- Gurm

[turk690]

That's right: the "120 minutes" on some blank DVD media labels do not mean much. But if u have been authoring DVDs a while u get to figure some patterns. For example, I exclusively create my *.mv2 streams from the Adobe Premiere 6.5 timeline. If I use the built-in MainConcept encoder at its "medium" bitrate settings (4200mb/s), and include a Dolby digital audio track encoded at 256kb/s, with, say, three pages of static menus, I find I can get about 1hr55mins or so on a 4.7GB DVD-R. For better quality and the "high" (6000mb/s) bitrate settings are used with the same audio bitrate, u just get 1hr25mins or so, roughly the same on using the "medium" bitrate, with a full, uncompressed PCM audio track. I mentioned "static menus" because in DVD-lab there is a tendency to get carried away and create very fancy, multi-page motion menus with motion transitions; it's difficult to predict exactly how big the resulting VTS_01_0.VOB will get in addition to the main program. Absolute professionals have 8.5GB on two layers at their disposal to play with and thus can create very high-quality videos with all the soundtracks, etc. above the 2hr mark compared with the 4.7GB we amateurs have at the moment.

[jaxxboss]

LOL
Poor guy, I knew he was gonna get a bunch of answers he wasnt looking for. I go 2hrs, 20 min max.
Sometimes an ink blot is just an ink blot. [/b]

[turk690]

to jaxxboss: At the 2hrs20mins maximum u say what ave. & max video bitrates did u use? For audio is it PCM or DD? If DD what bitrate? Did u have menus?

[jaxxboss]

Audio is PCM, yea I know it takes up more space. My dvd palyers just dont like mp2. AC3 is an entirely different story. Untill there is something less expensive than the ones that do great ac3 and something better than besweet I will stick with pcm. Bitrates vary depending on if im doing tv shows or movies. D1 half D1 720x480 , 352x480 yada yada yada... All depends what Im encoding.

[Acolyte]

Thanks Jaxboss...I value that advice...

I backed up Titanic (192 min) and noticed some poor quality...

I think I agree with your assessment, I won't go over 2 hour 20 minutes as well..well, maybe a little but not much...

[jaxxboss]

Yea, it's a hit n miss option really. If it looks good to you then by all means go for it. I have done 3 hours and 20 min and it was just so so. If you're tight on $$$ then go longer. Still waiting for that ac3 thats afordable and will work just about all the time.

[overloaded_ide]

I backed up Titanic (192 min) and noticed some poor quality...

HA HA HA

It would be simplier for you to just do a search for my thread on the titanic experiment I did than for me to try to explain it here

Basically I captured 2 tapes, made a 2 disk set, then both on one disk.
Quality was very good! In some really large dark areas I can notice some artifacts but rarely do others that aren't into this stuff heavy like us.

Although I have a perfect 2 disk set, we most often just watch the all on one disk, almost as good!

Lord of the RING, both movies were backed up from DVDs and are really good also. Both about 3 hours! All I did to the disks were remove any langauge I didn't want and maybe max compress the extra's and menu's to make more space for the movies then a full backup. Used DVDshrink. Only thing I ever use for backups so far.

Most the time any geusts watching our DVD's don't even notice they are backups, unless they see the plain old gloss white top with sharpie writing.

[Acolyte]

I backed up Titanic (192 min) and noticed some poor quality...

HA HA HA

It would be simplier for you to just do a search for my thread on the titanic experiment I did than for me to try to explain it here

Basically I captured 2 tapes, made a 2 disk set, then both on one disk.
Quality was very good! In some really large dark areas I can notice some artifacts but rarely do others that aren't into this stuff heavy like us.

Although I have a perfect 2 disk set, we most often just watch the all on one disk, almost as good!

Lord of the RING, both movies were backed up from DVDs and are really good also. Both about 3 hours! All I did to the disks were remove any langauge I didn't want and maybe max compress the extra's and menu's to make more space for the movies then a full backup. Used DVDshrink. Only thing I ever use for backups so far.

Most the time any geusts watching our DVD's don't even notice they are backups, unless they see the plain old gloss white top with sharpie writing.

Funny how the least little thing amuses him

[Acolyte]

Interesting

Indiana Jones and The Temple of Doom (Widescreen...118 min)

57% on the CloneDVD Quality Bar...

Minutes don't mean all that much...seems like there are other forces at work here...

[overloaded_ide]

Funny how the least little thing amuses him

Ummm, yes.

I have seen quite a few posts about titanic since I did my experiment about a month ago. It has been mentioned many times also.
Goes to show some people just never do searches before posting.

Maybe 10 on just titanic at least so far.

[Gazorgan]

Titanic? Yucko.

I have done 3 hour movies as a backup. To make it artifact free, you really need to go 1/2D1. It looks awesome and takes an overnight encode. No big deal.

Transcoding can achieve similiar results, but you really have to dump the menus/extras. Trim the intro and trailing credits and you can usually hit the 80% compression range, which usually transcodes pretty well.

[Acolyte]

Titanic? Yucko.

I have done 3 hour movies as a backup. To make it artifact free, you really need to go 1/2D1. It looks awesome and takes an overnight encode. No big deal.

Transcoding can achieve similiar results, but you really have to dump the menus/extras. Trim the intro and trailing credits and you can usually hit the 80% compression range, which usually transcodes pretty well.

1/2d1? Explain please

As I said as with the movie "Indiana Jones and The Temple Of Doom" I backed up using CLONEDVD and the qulity bar was at 57%, this was with the bare essentials no menu...are you using a better program?

[Adder_78]

As I said as with the movie "Indiana Jones and The Temple Of Doom" I backed up using CLONEDVD and the qulity bar was at 57%, this was with the bare essentials no menu...are you using a better program?

Well CCE SP is much better... 8)

[Vejita-sama]

I've put ~7.5hrs of VCD standard video (352x240 @ 1150kbit/s & audio at 128kbit/s) on a DVDR.

As others have stated there is no time limit for DVD media, only a bitrate/filesize limit. How low a bitrate before quaility starts to suffer? That's a matter of personal choice. Also depends on the quaility of our source and how you encode it.

Since you seem to be talking about DVD backups, re-encoding w/ CCE 3-5pass VBR will produce greatly different results than transcoding.

[mysticgohan17]

1/2d1? Explain please

Half D1
Full D1