DV to DVD - bitrate/storage question

[ardklg]

I'm trying to convert some analog video to DVD for a family Christmas present. I'm using the pass-through function of my Sony Digital8 camcorder and capturing the DV with Video Studio 6.

The video ran 2 hours and 1 minute, and ended up in a 25 GB file (which sounds about right given what I've read on here).

I then went into Cyberlink's PowerDirector Pro (which came bundled with my DVD-R drive), trimmed a few seconds off each end of the file, and then "produced" (converted) the video to DVD MPEG2 format. The first try (default of 5000 kb/s) came out too big (4.8 GB), so I did it again using 4700 kb/s. That came out to around 4.5 GB. When I tried to author using the PowerDirector Pro Disc Wizard, it said the file was too big. So I did another pass at 4500 kb/s, and ended up with a 4.2 GB file, but the Disc Wizard program still complained about it being too big.

So I shelled out the $25 for the NeroVision add-on. When I bring the 4.2 GB file into that, it says it will be using 5.4 GB of space on the disc (700 MB over the limit).

So I'm confused. It seems like I should be able to fit 2 hours of good quality video on a DVD easily. I've been making SVCDs of captured TV shows for the past year, and can fit 50 minutes of 2500 kb/s video on a 700 MB CD. Something doesn't seem right here.

Any pointers would be greatly appreciated.

[tonyp12]

I checked with the wizard tmpenc have.

A 2hours movie clip (120minutes)
would require a 3700 kbits/sec video bitrate.
so the end result will be 4.38GB

I think the low number has to do with that the audio is
"bandwidth stealing" linear PCM.


Using MP2 audio, the video bitrate could be 4700.

[ardklg]

Hmm.......

Well, in PowerDirector Pro the audio bitrate is set to 224 kb/s.

I guess I'll try a lower video bitrate and see what happens.

The main thing that seemed odd was that a 4.2 GB MPEG2 file, supposedly in DVD format, would occupy 5.4 GB of disc space.

Thanks for the input.

[bugster]

I don't know anything about powerdirector pro but here is my guess.

When converting from DV to Mpeg, it converts audio and video to produce the output file. This will contain mpeg 2 video and mpeg 1 Layer 2 audio (mp2). This is a compressed audio format that is valid for European DVD players but is not one of the mandatory audio formats for North American players, hence some do not support it. Therfore when authoring the DVD it is likley that Power director Pro is transcoding the audio to PCM (which is valid for US DVD players and MUST be supported). This is uncompressed and takes up a lot of space, hence the apparent increase in size.

I would take a careful look at the options available in Power director to see if you can set it to leave the audio in mp2 format, there is a reasonable chance that you can play it. If not, I would suggest looking to alternative authoring packages that do support mp2 audio, such as Ulead's products, Dazzle DVD complete and many others. You may want to consider Ac3 audio too, although converting to this format is a bit of a pain and it is less well supported by consumer level packages.

Hope this helps

[jwputnam]

The audio file is the problem. It is converting to PCM. I get around this by re-encoding with TMPGNec and then authoring with DVD Movie Factory.