How much AVI video Capture fit on a DVD ?

[tadrian]

I have captured som avi files from my videocamera, each tape is 1 hour and each avi file is about 12Gb. I now want to create a 4.7Gb DVD with menues containing the movies.

How can I find out how much of my avi files will fit on the DVD ?

Thanks
Thomas

[mwkurt]

Okay...I'll bite. You haven't done any searching for your answers have you?
First off, You can't put an avi file on a DVD with menus and such and have it play in your DVD player. You need to convert your avi file to an mpeg file. 2nd, you can put 4.37GB of mpeg file on your DVD, which includes your menus and such. As far as how much you can put on the DVD. It has to do with bitrate vs. time. The less time you want to put on your DVD, the higher the bitrate you can use to get really good results. If you choose to put over 2 or 3 hours on a DVD, your bitrate goes down and the quality goes out the window. There are variables of course. You can convert to Half D1 with a lower bitrate and get pretty good quality as opposed to Full D1. There are also other DVD compliant resolutions that you can put on a DVD with different bitrates and have okay quality. There is SVCD that will play in most DVD players. It is pretty much like VHS quality. The standard bitrate foe SVCD is about 2250, I believe. You could probably fit 4 or 5 hours on a DVD at VHS quality. There is alot you can do but you have to do some research yourself. Go read some guides from this site then come back and ask questions pertaining to the guides. No one here will spoon feed you the answers.
Mark

[ZippyP.]

Good quality 2 hours, better quality 1 hour. We're talking home video footage here.

[tadrian]

eh..Thanks, I'll bite back !

My question is still unanswered to me (call me stupid)
I am not sure what my bitrate is when capturing (Premiere does not tell me) but I guess it must be standard capture bitrate !

I do not want to make a SVCD och use VHS quality, I want full DVD quality , how much AVI capture will fit on my DVD (menues excluded) or how can I calculate this myself ?

Bite me !
Thomas

[guns1inger]

DV is fixed at around 25000kbps - way to high for DVD. If they were shot handheld, you should keep the running time down to an hour or so (one tape per disc) as hand held requires a higher bitrate to preserve quality.

Get a bitrate calculator (there is an online version here -> https://www.videohelp.com/tools?tool=VideoHelp_Bitrate_calculator
or you can download an offline one from the tools section. Enter your running time, and it will tell you the bitrate to use when encoding. If you are putting an hour - 70 minutes to a disc, use CBR encoding using the bitrate from the calculator. if you put more on, use VBR, with the bitrate calculator's number as the average.

[garryheather]

how much AVI capture will fit on my DVD

None. Unless you make a data disc but it wouldn't play on a DVD player.

As said previously, you still need to author a DVD and that includes taking the AVI source and re-encoding it into MPEG2, possibly changing the audio and maybe even the video resolution. You cannot just drag-and-drop, which is what I think you're hoping to do.

Menus add very little overhead to a disc unless you go for animated menus in which case this can make a minor dent. I would be more worried about the audio off the camera as this is unlikely to be directly compatible with the DVD specification and some domestic authoring packages will expect (or output) a 2 channel linear track which should sound OK but will take up a lot of disc space in comparison.

Check out the How To guides to the left for a good starting point.

[mats.hogberg]

ZippyP. has already given you the answer:

Good quality 2 hours, better quality 1 hour.

/Mats

[yoda313]

You can't put an avi file on a DVD with menus and such and have it play in your DVD player

Well you can but only if you encode the dv avi file to divx and you have an ultra divx compatible dvd player that supports menus. Then you can keep it in the avi domain with no need to convert to mpg then author it to dvd.

THOUGH I assume you want the more compatible standard dvd format so you would need to convert to mpg and then author to dvd as has been suggested above.

Just wanted to add you can do avi on dvd but you have restrictions.

EDIT - I don't think divx dvd players can play straight dv avi files. I don't believe they have those codecs installed. But since you'd have to chop them down to 4.7gb for single or 8gb for dual layer you still couldn't fit a full 12gb 1hour dv file if you could play them without reencoding. So you'd endup having to split them to multiple discs or just reencode them to a lower bitrate anyway. So you do have to some work.