MovieFactory 6+ can't fit movie to DVD

[PixelShifter]

I have authored a DVD with about 5 hours of material.
That doesn't fit on DVD-4.7 with the default settings.
If I experiment alittle with the MPEG settings I can make it fit.
But that's just a lot of guesswork often the result is to largge or small.
Is there a way to let MovieFactory calculate the optimum setting so that the DVD is 100% filled. That woul give the best possible quality for that DVD size.

[DVDDoug]

I have authored a DVD with about 5 hours of material.

You can fit 90 minutes of good quality video and Dolby audio on a single-sided DVD. If you push it much past 2 hours, you will probably start to notice the quality loss. At five hours, you will have very poor quality.

The file size is determined by playing-time, and the combined audio/video bitrate. You set-up the bitrate under Project Settings.

Here's a handy Online Bitrate Calculator.

[PixelShifter]

I converted the video's with another tool and the quality is the same as the source.
But the source quality isn't that hard to match because it isn't very high quality either.
Looks like VHS/anolog TV quality. And even lower as it could be. Some recordings are almost 20 years old. So in that case using high bitrates won't improve much and just wastes space.
Speaking of old recordings; are there noise filters for MF6+?

Thanks for the bitrate calculator. A very useful tool. Pitty MF6+ doesn't do an exact fit itself...

[cgould]

If you are making DVDs of analog tapes, you should look at half-D1 resolution, or 352x480 instead of 720x480. This resolution is often sufficient for VHS dubs, and will give you a lot more bandwidth room since you're only encoding half the pixels.

You should be able to fit ~4hrs of decent looking video on a 4.7GB disk, near 2.5Mb/s (vs 5Mb/s for 2hrs full 720x480 res.) If you stretch it much lower, you might fit 5hrs, but it may look pretty bad, especially for lots of changes/motion in the image (eg you get lots of pixelation.)

I would strongly recommend some sort of noise reduction, before you encode to MPG; the more noise you have (of useless pixels not good image detail), the more bandwidth of compression is wasted trying to show each of those individual pixels (which you actually don't want/care about anyway.) I thinks they are high resolution important features and tries to preserve them.

[PixelShifter]

I'm going to try the lower resolution too.
The recording has no fast action. In fact it's nearly static.
Just Bob Ross doing some painting....

I agree with you on the noise filtering. But how? With what?
Can you suggest a tool? I'm not an expert as you have figured out by now so I would prefer something 'automatic'.