Okay, I have used my video camera to record a "class" I attended. I've transfered that information from the camcorder to a VHS (I don't have direct connection to my computer with my camcorder), and have now transfered the video to my hard drive. It is exactly 2 hours and 8 minutes. When I try to burn it to a DVD I'm told there's too much and not enough room to put it all on one DVD. How might I "shrink" the video already on my hard drive so that it WILL fit on 1 DVD?
Question: Is it already in DVD (MPG2) format? if so, just use DVD Shrink. If not, then you have to encode it to DVD format. Use a bitrate calculator to determine the optimal bitrates for video and audio (if you want to go outside spec) and encode.
I use pinnacle. although the dvd's say they hold up to 2 hours it only holds 1 hour with full quality. the best thing to do is manually adjust the quality of the dvd that you are compling from the settings. but the thing is it does reduce the quality drastically. but if it's just a class lecture i don't think quality will be a big issue. if you really only need a way to play it in your computer, the best thing is just make an mpg, avi or wmv.
The internal encoder within Pinnacle is not very good. That's probably why you're only getting 1 hour. If you use a better encoder, you can reduce the bitrates with better results than Pinnacle.
I use pinnacle 10.7 and a dvd only holds about 1 1/2 hours of video if you don't add a lot of background mp3's and transitions make two movies and then run it through DVD Shrink to get it on one 4.7 disc
