Tried a search on this one - but couldn't find anything.

How much typical HDV footage can you get on a standard 4.5 GB DVD. I am editing a project in Final Cut Pro and it seems I can get about 50 minutes per disk.

Are there better ways of compressing the footage to get more on there. Obviously all the commercial DVDs I own have a couple of hours on them - or is this because the image is smaller?

What are the typical solutions?

Alex

Are you making an SD or HD DVD using standard Red Dye discs?

If the former you can convert HDV to an SD m2v an you should be able to get more than 50 minutes a disc especially using AC3 audio. An hour and a half of video can be encoded at an average rate of 6.58Mbps (check out this Video Rate Calculator )with audio of 192 and that should be more than fine for a vast majority of footage. (In fact the rate for 50 minutes is 9.60Mbps which is periously close to the maximum rate for the video stream of 9.8 Mbps.) bitVice, a third party encoder, defaults to 4.5Mbps because the size/quality trade-off "sweet spot" for them seems to be there.

On HD DVD the rates are higher and using the lowest Average Bit Rate of 10Mbps on an m2v stream will be more in the line of 50 minutes or so. H.264 will get some more on though the few HD DVD players seemed to play better with m2v.

Anyway to make an SD export via Compressor using a 16:9 preset (or make your own) and then bring the m2v into DVD SP and set the track properties to 16:9 Letterbox (not Letterbox/Pan & Scan or Pan & Scan) and it will be 16:9 on a 16:9 screen and Letterboxed on a 4:3 screen (subject to people messing around with television and DVD Player settings )

Howdy....
Are you making normal DVD's Alex?

A raw 60 minute HDV m2t 1440/1080 25mbps file takes up about 12 GIGS of space.
So you would only get about 15-20 mins of raw HDV onto a normal DVD-R disk.

So you compress it down to MPEG2, 720/576 @ 7-8mbps average to get 60 mins on a DVD.
9 mbps is about as high as you can go.
Hence DVD's are low quality even compared to normal mini DV which is 25mbps.
Some DVD's are dual layer so you can get twice the amount on them.

Thanks guys.

Really appreciated.

Alex

Hello guys,

I have a question regarding HDV- DVD, was hoping to find an answer...
I heard someone saying that she 'converted' HDV to DVD and that the quality was 'almost' as good as a blue ray disk?!
She said that her DVD will play on any DVD player.
I am a begginer using final cut (she also uses final cut) do I convert my footage using quick time conversion, which settings should I use? I have converted HDV to PAL DV before but the quality is not comparable to HDV.
I of course asked her how to burn these 'magical DVD's but she said it is her secret! Can anyone help me?
Regards

Volker

No big secret - first thing is that a DVD Player with upscaling and an HDMI connection can output video that looks very good and at normal viewing distances can look just the same as blu-ray or HD DVD to many people. Not saying it will be HD DVD or blu-ray quality, but will look fine. Then it is an issue of encoding an HDV stream to an SD DVD format - m2v. You will do the same calulations to see what fits then encode on a DVD. You can either send the timeline to Compressor or export as self contained then run that through Compressor. Sometimes, depending on the edits, sending to Compressor directly can improve quality for things like text (but is also depends on how you export the self contained movie.)

How the video looks will be a function of how good the footage aquired worked out of course and you may need some tweaks in frame controls in terms of scaling (usually "better" scaling is one) but encoding is art and sscience and you may need to make a couple of passes to find optimal setings, there is never one perfect setting though you can make ones that work generally well. And a SD DVD does play on any DVD.

Also you probably do not want to convert HDV (NTSC) to PAL DV then encode the PAL DV since you are reducing quality going to DV, should go to PAL HDV then m2v. Often (depedning on footage) you can just edit the whole thing in HDV (NTSC) export the full edit to PAL HDV self contained then encode that. That has been one way that I have gotten good conversion results. [Note using the ProRes or Intermediate Codec are also good options to work with)

Of course there are other things to try, but that should be a good start.

Volker,
This has been covered in the past. Do a search on BluRay in this subforum.
Good luck.