Question about DVD burning with Pinnacle studio

[cumi]

Hi!

I captured a DV and made a project in Pinnacle Studio. It's about 61 minutes. Then I wanted to burn a DVD. Surprisingly, Studio said that at 100% of quality I am 7 minutes above the DVD size. How can it be? It says, it can burn only 54 minutes to DVD. I thougth, on a 4.7GB DVD (+R) I can burn more. Even on DVD disc is written 4.6GB or 120 minutes.

What am I doing wrong?

Should I maybe check the "MPEG Audio" (to use MPEG intead of PCM) checkbox to save more space?

I had to set on "Automatic Bitrate" to fit it on the DVD, and it said it will be at 85% quality. Why is that? I don't want to loose on quality... Actually, I bought the DVD-RW, because of bad quality of VCDs. I want to make nice quality DVDs from our family events.

By the way, what bitrate is the "normal" bitrate on DVD?

Thanks
cumi

[guns1inger]

PCM eats a lot of space. That, combined with what appears to be a few minutes of arbitrary space left in reserve is causing your problem.

To be honest, I wouldn't trust a one-click solution to give you optimum results, or rely on anything it tells you to be true.

I use a standalone encoder that gives me total control over the video outcome, encode my audio seperately in another application, and author in a third. I would get an hour of very aulity and 90 minutes of high quality on the same disk without issue.

I would suggest that it is not only using PCM audio, but CBR video encoding. Some will recommend it for home movies, especially hand-held. Most commercial disks use variable bitrate (VBR) encoding, which allows for a better dispersal of available bitrate based on the requirements of each frame (and the rates are often massaged by hand for the more difficult sections). Persoanlly, I almost always use multi-pass VBR and have had no complaints.

Change it to mpeg audio, use a bitrate calculator to get you the correct bitrate and set this as a constant and see how you go. This site provides it's own on-line calculator here https://www.videohelp.com/calc.htm

Just set the length to the length of your video, and the audio bitrate to whatever you need (1536 for LPCM, probably 192 or 224 for mpeg) and give it a whirl.

[cumi]

Can you tell me how to do this? What options should I use when making "MPEG File" with Pinnacle Studio and how to burn it with Nero?

[jg0001]

Given that it is only 7 minutes, you may be better off lowering the video bitrate than downgrading to MP2 audio. A video bitrate of 6000-8000 is on the high end and the differences from 6k to 8k will not likely be all that noticeable. You can change settings in Pinnacle Studio to get the project into the alloted size quite easily. One thing you can do is set it to "DVD Compliant" or somesuch at first, then switch it to "Custom". It should still be set at DVD levels and you can then twiddle with the fine tuning to get it to fit.

Personally, I don't like to degrade my audio in Pinnacle to MPEG audio, but in reality it may never make much difference to you. I have the upgrade which let's it encode Dolby Digital AC-3 (stereo) and I find that to be a better solution. Again, though if you can get it to fit with uncompressed audio with just a minor tweak in the video bitrate, you'll be fine.

Regarding the size, don't forget that the menus you include will require some space. It's not worth the trouble to try to get every last bit out of the size. Pinnacle gets pretty damn close as it is. The worst thing you can do is encode for hours only to end up with a file 101% of maximum size then you have to start all over again or transcode it down.