questions about DVD production

[method]

I am new to making DVD and i need some advise and suggestions from experts.I have the following questions in my mind in order to produce a professional good quality DVD out of some avi files(shot by my camera) that i edited them in adobe premier.

Note: i am using Adobe encore and adobe premier pro

I have the following questions in my mind :

1)At what point should i worry about the lenght of the movie ? I mean how many min of avi movie can fit in on DVD with good quality?

2) when i need consider using 2 DVD instead of one ? What ways are available to force a movie to fit in one dad without loss of quality?

3) should i edit the whole movie avi file as one big file and then burn it to DVD ? or should i edit the complete movie in many separate files and then burn them to DVD?I want to know to know the best practice.

4) Do i need to make different chapters for a movie like music video clips ? or i just
place one button to play the whole movie without allowing the viewer to navigate ?

5)At what stage of DVD production i need to select bitrate and mpeg settings? What is good quality settings

[guns1inger]

1. How long is a piece of string ? You should be able to fit 60 - 90 minutes at very good quality, up to 120 minutes at slightly lesser quality. After that you are asking for trouble. (Note: assumes single layer disc). To a degree this is also source dependent. Very high quality source will give you better results for a longer film than lower quality source. Then again, for VHS sourced material you can probably get away with half-D1 (although possibly not in Encore) and put three hours on a disc without problems. In short - there are no absolutes.

2. See previous answer. A single layer disk will fit approx one hour at the highest permissible bitrate. Theoretically, anything after that starts to affect quality. The question you need to answer for yourself is; at what point do you begin to notice the reduction in quality. Find that point, then go back to a point before that and you have your disc capacity.

3. Each clip is a title. Titles have chapters within them. With some juggling it is possible to make a jump from title to title work almost like a chapter jump, but there will be pauses in between. Best practice - edit and work within logical titles. If this means editing together 28 or 280 pieces of video, then that's what it means. Add chapters within titles to navigate. One thing that I absolutley loathe is the lazy person who just dumps there tape to disc with every scene being a seperate title.

4. Up to you. You do what you want to do. Chapters aid navigation. If the clip is short you may not need any. If it is longer than 15 - 20 minutes, I would start putting them in.

5. Once you know how much footage you have. If you work forwards, you edit, determine how long it is (in total if you have multiple titles) and calculate your bitrate. If you determine it is too low, you can look at splitting some titles onto a second disc, moving to dual layer, or splitting your main title at a logical point. If you work backwards, you determine how long the title needs to be to meet an arbitrary bitrate, and edit your titles to fit within this bitrate. Insane, but you can do it. As for good settings - see points 1 and 2