Trying to drop the bitrate when authoring a DVD

[avgeek]

I have a 2.5 hour video that I'd like to be able to get onto one 4.7 gig DVDR. The material was shot in SVideo, so I"m wondering if I can drop that bitrate to accomplish this without a decent decrease in image quality. I'm using Vegas 3.0 and rendering straight to Mpeg2.

Any ideas? I've monkeyed with the video quality setting and have only saved a few hundred K for my efforts.

thanks
-d

[Baldrick]

The video bitrate would be around 3mbit/s, you could try lower the resolution to 352x480/576(dvdstandard)...you will lose some sharpness but more bitrate to each pixel which mean less mpeg artifacts. Also try different encoders like tmpgenc, cce.

[avgeek]

Thanks Baldrick, love the website and your show!
-D

[SLK001]

I believe that for 2.5 hours of video (150 minutes) you can use about 4Mbps for encoding and still squeeze it onto a DVD-R. I would encode at full D1 DVD resolution (720 by 480/576) so that you maintain all of your original detail. This amount of video should be no problem at all and will still maintain very high quality.

[Baldrick]

Ohh...I calculated with a 3 hours video....4 mbit should be enough for full d1.

[avgeek]

Thanks guys. I love this list!
-D