How to export with BEST qaulity and BEST sound..

[Masera]

I am making a video about homeless youth, and we are putting it on a DVD but first we are saving each segment into a file to save on a HD before we glew them all together

My questions are,

Should we put all the segments on ONE project and then export them as one big file or should we put each segment as one chapter?

Whats the BEST way to export for qaulity?

[2Dogs]

Hi, and welcome to the forum.

It's hard to answer your questions without knowing more details about your workflow.

I could make some assumptions however. If you were shooting the footage with a miniDV camcorder, then the universal recommendation would be to capture the video and do all your edits using the DV avi format.

If you divide the project into separate, bite-size chunks, you could have a separate Video Studio project file for each one. Breaking things down in this way can simplify editing, and it might also allow you to divide the editing work amongst different people.

Assuming that your final target output is a DVD, once you've done all the edits you should render each project to a DVD compatible mpeg-2 file. Using this multiple separate project approach, it would be very important to ensure that you rendered each project to files with exactly the same properties.

What those properties would be would depend on the nature of your project, and it's duration.

For example, for the highest possible picture quality, you could make a project with a duration of about one hour, if using a single layer DVD.

If your project contained a significant amount of still images, by way of a slideshow, for example, the project duration could be longer.

I believe Video Studio defaults to a video bitrate of 8000 kbps, which is suitable for a project duration of a little over an hour, assuming a single layer DVD.

You could insert the DVD compliant mpeg-2 created from each separate project into the "Create Disc" step of Video Studio. You would then "author" the DVD, i.e. create the navigation menus and chapter points.

Alternatively, Video Studio should allow you to insert the actual VS project files into the Create disc step. Some users report problems when trying to do this, however. To create the DVD, VS will have to render each component project to DVD compliant mpeg-2 format, which might take anywhere from one hour, if using a fast pc, to approaching three hours for a slowish pc, based on a one hour project duration. By contrast, if you've already rendered each separate project to a DVD compliant mpeg-2 file, the disc creation process may then only take twenty minutes or less if everything is correctly set up.

So, as you can see, there are choices to be made, which will be dependent on your particular circumstances and preferences.

Good luck!

[Ken Berry]

And just to add a little further detail to 2Dogs excellent explanation, the higher the bitrate, the higher the quality (presuming the original video was of high quality to start with). According to international DVD standards, you can burn a DVD which has a total bitrate of something like 9700 kbps, but that includes both video and audio bitrate. Some stand-alone video players have difficulty playing discs with video bitrates much over 8000 kbps, so 2Dogs' mention of 8000 kbps in fact equates with high quality DVD.

As he says, you can fit around an hour of high quality video onto a single layer DVD using that bitrate. But you can squeeze perhaps another 10 minutes on if you use one of the more highly compressed audio bitrates such as Dolby or mpeg-2 layer two, instead of the standard LPCM audio, which, while excellent, produces larger files.

Drop the bitrate, and you can fit correspondingly more video onto the DVD, but quality becomes less. A bitrate of 6000 kbps still produces good (though not excellent) quality video, and you can fit around 90 minutes of video onto a single layer DVD (or a little more using Dolby or mpeg layer 2 audio). And a bitrate of 4000 kbps allows 2 hours of video, though the quality is average. Below that, quality drops off markedly.

[Black Lab]

Should we put all the segments on ONE project and then export them as one big file or should we put each segment as one chapter?

Whats the BEST way to export for qaulity?

Whether you put all the segments in one project or each as it's own title will not make a difference in the quality, so long as you follow Ken's and 2Dog's recommendations.

Whether you put them all together or leave them separate will depend solely on how you want your DVD to play. You could put them all together but have each segment marked by a chapter point so you could jump there if desired. Or, if you leave them separate (referred to as separate "titles") each segment (title) could have it's own thumbnail on the menu.