DVD authoring roadblock!

11th Sep 2005 08:05 #1

Member

I'm not so new at DVD authoring. I've been using Adstech DVD X-press for about a year now, and made many home movies of VHS tapes into dvd's. Now i've got a roadblock.

My DVD X-press is on the fritz. I need to get a new one. I've been using an ATI TV Wonder tonight. I successfully captured the 2 hour tape to mpeg-2 format. Now here's the roadblock.

Here are the settings i have:

Video Standard Lines - NTSC (525)
Size - 640x240
keep high resolution display during capture UNCHECKED
Audio Format - 48000 khz at 16 bit stereo
Type - mpeg-2
visual masking CHECKED
capture cropped video UNCHECKED

Frames are something new that are not involved in the DVD X-press capwiz software. I do not know what they mean. In here, there's number of P frames in group, which is set to 4, and number of B frames in subgroup, which is set to 2.

I have things set to a variable bit rate, at 3.54Mbits per second. I've used this setting on DVD X-press capwiz software and it gave me about 2 1/2 hours of video on 1 DVD-R.

Motion Estimation Quality is something new to me. I leave it at the default, which is 75.

The maximum file size is set at a 4.7GB DVD.

Now using DVD X-press and the capwiz software, i can easily squeeze this 2 hours of video on a dvd with room left over. It would give me about a 3.5gb mpeg-2 file.

** For some reason, using this ATI TV Wonder, i get 5.6gb mpeg-2 file. **

Can someone tell me if i can adjust something to lessen the amount of space, so i can squeeze it onto a dvd-r?

I don't know about the motion estimation quality thing, so i'm thinking that might have something to do with it. Is it too high? Also, what about the P and B frames? The screen size i've used successfully on DVD X-press was 720x480. This one is set at 640x240. Can that be made different to lessen the size of the mpeg-2 file?

obviously there are differences between the DVD X-press Capwiz software and the TV Wonder software.

Any help would be appreciated.

thanx!