Avi to Mpeg to large!

[The Bog]

Ok..I downloaded a few Avi's. They are 20 min clips of a cartoon in avi format. They range between 50 to 90 megs in size. As a test, I used TMPGEnc to encode one 20 min cartoon to an mpg. I selected DVD NTSC format and left all the other options defaulted. The file size came out to be 1.2 Gigs for a 20 min cartoon! Oh and the original format for these avi's are 320X240.

I would like to get about 36 of these cartoons onto one DVD-R. That would mean 12 hours onto one DVD. Has anyone done this and the picture quality been ok? I seem to remember reading about someone putting all the friends episodes onto one DVD lol.

Do I just need to crank the Bitrate down way low? Do I set the ratio to 1:1 or to 3:4 ntsc? I would like to play these on a stand alone player.

Thanks for any help.

[Vejita-sama]

The only thing that effects the size of your encodes is the bitrate. The size of the source, the resolution of the source, the resolution of the encode, etc. etc. doesn't matter.

If you set your bitrate at 6000kbit/s then that's how big 1 sec will be. Use a bitrate calculator (look to the left under tools) to find out how big your encoded MPEG will be (based on source runtime and bitrate)

Also you never want to take a low resolution source and resize it to a higher resolution. That's like blowing up a little 80x60 jpg to full screen. So if your source is 320x240 the only NTSC legal resolution you should go for is 352x240. But you don't want 720x480 (D1) as that will look like crap

IF you d/loaded DivX files they are meant to be watched on the PC and have a DAR (display aspect ratio) of 1:1. If you're encoding them to MPEG1 or MPEG2 to watch on standalone you'll want the encoded MPEG to be 4:3.

If you choose any of the standard TMPGenc templates all of this will be set automatically thou.