Does anyone know how to get more than 1 hour of high quality home video on a DVD? I am using a Pinnacle Systems capture card to capture home video from a camcorder (analog) and then burn it to a DVD using Pinnacle Studio8 and my Sony DRU500A drive. Everything works fine except that I can only get about 54 minutes of 100% quality on the DVD disk. I can get 114 minutes if I lower the quality down to around 37% but the DVD then doesn't look like the original camcorder tape. Is there some other software I need to compress the files even more? There has got to be a way to do this as I know I have a commercial DVD that is only a 4.7GB disk and it has a 90 minute movie on it. Thanks for any help you can give me.
I have a DazzleII boarfd and I encode at 6Mb/sec and I get 75 to 80 minutes on a DVD. I don't notice any loss in quality at this encoding rate. I also use Sonic DVD software so this could also play in to things to some degree. I think all the overhead files and extras that comprise a DVD video is about 1 gig since I can only put around 3.3 Gbytes of mpeg2 files on a disk. Anyway, to get more on a DVD, just lower your bitrate. I would rather have perfect quality and get almost an hour and a half than less than perfect quality and more time. Good luck.
Hello, I would recommend Adobe Premiere 6.5 and dvdit PE. They work together. You can put your avi files into Premiere and then go to file/export timeline/Adobe mpeg encoder and pick your compression settings. Or you can use their standard dvd settings that work great. Premiere is amazing and allows you limitless creativity. You should even be able to import your movie directly into Premiere from your capture card. From their export the dvd ready mpeg using their decoder and use dvdit PE (not my first choice but it configures itself right into premiere 6.5) to finish up your dvd. That's what I did and its amazingly easy.
skilletd, Welcome to the world of digital video !! The problem you describe can be directly attributed to the quality of the MPEG2 encode used by your programme. One of the better recognised ones is made by a company called Main Concept. You can try this if you want to. There is a video editing programme called "Edit Studio", it can be downloaded from the Pure Motion Home page (30 day free trial period) Having done this, you can then download the Main Concept MPEG2 encoder (MPEG XS) This is also free, but puts a watermark over what you encode. However, it is quite flexable in what it can do. Give it a try, it's free after all. I have found the quality to be very good. HomerJ
