A new user!!!!! Hello everyone. I have a question

[shredding]

Hi, everyone, I'm a new Ulead user. absolutely loved it. I have a few questions:

when export my project to mpeg and to DVD, using the best settings, we can only store 1 hour of video on one disk. (8Mb bitrate) But normally hollywood movies use 5Mb bitrate and can store almost 2 hours of video. Does this mean 5Mb is adequate for DVD viewing? what is the bitrate for DV files then?

Also, i have another question. Movies or TV commercials have a different color from the video footages. (compare the commercial color and a live news footage. ) how do they achieve this? Ulead lets you correct the color of our videos but i just can't get it "film" like.

Thanks in advance. A big hello from me to everyone.

[Ron P.]

Hi Shredding, and welcome to the forums..

I can answer one of your questions. I'll start with saying I don't know how in TV production the different coloring between the commercials and the regular broadcast is handled.

Now the bitrate depends largely on what the original video format is. For example if you are going to import/transfer VHS tapes to edit, then yes a bitrate of 5000 is sufficient. In fact your quality would not suffer if you lowered that to 4000. If you are talking about Digital video, then I don't think I would go lower then 6000.

As I understand the commercial aspect of DVD production (from what I've read here from some of the real pros), they can use a real low bitrate due to the multi-pass process of encoding. While VS offers 2 pass, they may use 20 or more passes to encode. Then they don't burn DVDs they are pressed, which also helps with the quality of the product.

If you will read through some of the threads in the General Information, Tutorial sections, I'm sure you will find information on bitrates, and which works best for storing more video data on a DVD. Those sections can be found here:

http://phpbb.ulead.com.tw/EN/viewforum.php?f=31

Ron P.

[shredding]

Thanks! Ron. I think that answers it. I'll keep the bitrate highest possible then to encode. I have a min dv camcorder and that's my main source of input.

[DVDDoug]

A lot of commercial DVDs are dual-layer... Probably most are. So, they can get double the time at a given bitrate. The few commercial DVD's I've "looked at" have had bitrates of 5Mbs to 6Mbs.

At 6Mbs, you can get about 1.5 hours of video and AC3 audio on a single layer DVD. The quality seems quite good to me. When I try to squeeze more than 2 hours onto a DVD, I start to notice the video degradation.

The studios have better MPEG encoders. And, Ulead allows 2-pass encoding, for better quality. One of the members here mentioned that the studios use 20-pass encoding.... or something like that! In any case, the pros are able to squeeze more quality into a given bitrate.

Comparing the bitrates of two different formats is a bit of "apples to oranges", because they use different compression algorithms. But, DV is somewhere in the ballpark of 29Mbps... I think.... I suspect a 5Mbps DV file would look really bad! (You can't actually do that.... the DV spec is more "fixed" than the MPEG spec.)

Of course, Dolby AC3 audio gives you more disc space for your video.

I don't know much about the color issue, except that the color ranges for film are different from video, and colors are generated differently on a computer monitor, than with NTSC/PAL video. The pros use a calibrated NTSC (or PAL) video monitor instead of a regular VGA monitor, so they can see how the colors will look on the final DVD.

[TDK1044]

All very well made points. Also, regarding commercials, for my sins, I worked in TV production for 25 years and I made a few commercials along the way. They are given a 'technical pass' by MCR in most Networks, in that they are shot with heavy filters, and therefore hue sturation and chrominance are allowed to be exaggerated in order to make the pictures warmer and more welcoming.