Making DVD and Hard Drive Space

[Ensign]

A friend of my is so desperate to make DVD's that he is about to spend some hard earned money to built a system to handle it.

But, after deciding on what CPU/MB/Memory/case/drive etc. I think I have come up with something he forgot.

Free Hard Drive Space!

If I am right, don't one need at lease as much free space on ones hard drive as is on a DVD disk (4.7 MB) to make a DVD? And even more if one has to covert to the MPEG-2 format before those files are again converted in to the VOB/IFO/BUP files of a "real DVD"

Or to put in another way, A large empty space on a hard drive won't hurt. :P

For that is what I have been finding when I make DVD's

Any thoughts?

[redwudz]

Sure, you need a lot of hard drive space. Two hard drives work the best. The boot drive holds the OS and the second drive is used for capturing, editing, etc. Working with video, you can run out of room fast.

Just generally, figure three times the size of your original video file may be needed for the editing and encoding of it, because of multiple versions/copies of the file. That size can vary, up to about 30GB would not be uncommon. You delete these when you have completed the process.

I usually put a 80GB hard drive in for the boot drive and a 150-300GB for the capture/edit drive. I've use a third drive about the same sizes on a couple of machines for backup of the files. Having more than one hard drive will help when editing or capturing. Capturing to a boot drive is not recommended.

Encoding video is almost completely CPU speed dependent, the faster the CPU, the faster the encode. The RAM memory amount and hard drive type, size, location are not as important. I would recommend 512MB memory, and since it's not much more, a full 1GB RAM may be about optimum.

Two optical drives help also. These days with DVD burners being inexpensive, you might use two of those. This keeps from having to do disc changes when backing up a DVD. It also gives you the option of burning 2 discs at once if you ever need to.

The last thing to mention is a power supply with enough capacity to run all this. Use a good quality PS. A cheap PS that fails and destroys your computer is no bargain.

[yoda313]

Yep you need:

1 - enough space to record the video.

2 - enough space to author the video to dvd BEFORE burning.

So example:

Let's say you record a 4gb mpeg 2 file. Assuming its already in dvd format you need to author it and that will take about another 4gb (maybe a little more depending on how complex your menus are). Then you burn the 4 gb video_ts and audio_ts folder you get after authoring (the audio_ts folder is 0kb but necessary to be 100% dvd compliant - though most players will work without it).

So yes you need twice as much free harddrive space as your captured file.

Now if your capturing to an uncompressed or even a "lossless" avi codec your talking about a huge file for two hours of video (dv video is 13 gb an hour as an exmaple). Then you would need to convert that to mpeg 2 dvd mode and THEN author your dvd.

So advice for your friend:

GET A LARGE HARDDRIVE!!! (you can get 100gb or more harddrives at or under $100 USD easily with rebates these days - during the christmas holidays I got a 160gb harddrive for $40 after rebates).

[Ensign]

Thnak you for your replies. I always thought that making DVD's (or any videos) need a lot of space. In fact when I got my new BENQ DQ-60 the first thing I did was to remove 12GB of data from my hard drives

However, to prove that making DVD's require a lot of free space I did the following test.

Took the same videofile and encoded one as a MPEG-1 and the other in the MPEG 2 format

Then using Ulead I made a "test disk" to see how much room would it need to turn the 60 MB MPEG-1 into a DVD and the 267 MB MPEG 2 in to a DVD.

With Ulead it took 750 MB of space to make the MPEG-1 movie a DVD

While it took 372 MB of space to turn the MPEG-2 movie into a DVD

Which proves that the answer is yes, one need enought empty space on one's hard drive to make a DVD.

Now all I have to do is tell my friend to open his wallet a little wider

[jimmalenko]

I'd look at around 12-15GB as a bare minimum - even more if using DV as source. By the time you capture or rip material, author, maybe transcode if required, you'll need a bit of room.

Those ULEAD figures are quite startling, and I would say it was re-encoding. If you feed it DVD-compliant MPEGs what is the result ?

[PIntag]

Why are you so concerned about this? He's getting a new system -- do you think he'll end up getting a 4GB hard drive or something? His new system will probably have at least 160GB if not more.

Anyway, as already mentioned, a second physical hard drive is very beneficial for performance issues.

[SLK001]

You also never said anything about how your friend was going to make the videos to put on the DVD-R. If it's just ripping DVDs and using some transcoding program, then your system requirements would be different that if you were shooting videos on your camcorder, then encoding to MPEG2 and authoring.