Subs and Size related.

[Ngnzakt]

well this may be one of those topics that you all heard often but unfortunately i wasnt able to find the information needed to fix my problem. i use cyberlink power director for all my video authoring, i usually burn movies that are 700 to 1600 mb in size and the good thing about ciberlink is that it has the smartfit option in it, otherwise i could probably not be able to fit the whole movie on one cd.

well the thing is that i decided to start adding subtittles to my movies but... i have problems using ciberlink for such purpose. it does add the subtittles (SRT only) but like at the middle of the movie they're goen so... i manage to keep adding subtittle to the movie but instead of burning the whole project directly to the dvd, i opted for adding the subs and render the movie into a file. but... when i do that, the file size goes from 700 MB to 3 and some GB. this by using the mpge2 option in ciberlink. so my cuestion here is this... is there any other better option to add subs to a movie and render it directly to the dvd without all this messing around and also keeping some or most of the good quality from the original movie? or... a way to render the movie with subs onto a file but without making it huge in size?

if there's an option for doin this, i would love to hear it from you guys, cause this is driving me crazy. specially cause i hate to do double the job. i thank you in advance and hope you'll be able to help. thanks a bunch!

[redwudz]

That sounds like you are making VCD type low resolution videos. This is assuming they are movie length of around a hour or so. And it also sounds like Power Director is re-encoding the file to regular DVD format. That would explain the 3GB change. It would seem easier to use a DVD disc. The subs may be higher resolution than the video and PD is possibly making them match. But I don't use the program, so I'm just guessing.

And welcome to our forums.

[manono]

Yeah, there's a lot of information there but, unfortunately, most of it is useless. Except for the fact that Ngnzakt is using Power Director. That should be the first thing to go.

What we really need to know is what the source format is (AVI, DVD, what?) and what the intended output format is (AVI, VCD, DVD, what?).

If you don't understand the question or don't know the answer, post GSpot pics of both.

[Ngnzakt]

Yeah, sorry about that missing part manono. the source is an AVI file, and the final output source is DVD.

[manono]

Then I, like redwudz, am confused. I also figured you might be making a VCD because you were trying to keep the 700MB file size (or make it somewhere between 700 and 1600MB). When converting from AVI (XviD or DivX, usually) to MPEG-2 for DVD, it's usually said you need to increase the final size by a factor or 3 or 4 to have a quality similar to that of the source AVI. So, that 3+GB size you were complaining about isn't really all that much out of line.

You might give FAVC a try and see if if it handles the subs OK, which it should unless they're corrupt somehow. It supports SRT subtitles and is one of the good all-in-one AVI2DVD programs. Here's a guide:

http://www.digital-digest.com/articles/FAVC_Video_to_DVD_Guide_page1.html

Choose HCEnc as your encoder. And be prepared to have it be at least 2GB or larger in size. Maybe make it fill half a DVDR (2240MB or a bit less) so you can put 2 movies per DVDR.