newbie questions

[tmacdonald]

Hi, I am in the trial of 11+ and had some questions. I have a 10 minute video clip in HDV, 1440x1080 using the Cannon HV10. When I render it to DVD 16*9, 740x480 it is huge around 500m and really does not look good and when I put it in my DVD player just as a mpg file the picture looks grainy and their is no sound. I am viewing it on a 1080i tv. Also I have added text and other effects that when played in windows media don't show up, the scenes just abruptly change. What is the best format for DVD quality movies and how large will they be. How do they fit a 2 hour movie in 4.7G?

Thank you

Tim MacDonald

[DVDDoug]

I don't know why you aren't getting any sound. (I've noticed a lot of people with Canon HD cameras are having trouble.... But I don't think it's necessarily audio trouble.)

EDIT - Ulead has released a new version called "X2". Maybe some of these problems have been fixed...

The biggest factor affecting quality is bitrate, which is an indication of how much compression was used. If you use variable bitrate and two-pass encoding, you can get better quality for a given bitrate.

Your file size & playing time seem to indicate a reasonable bitrate. So,you may not see any improvement with a higher bitrate.

Higher bitrate = higher quality = bigger file size = lower compression = less playing time.

Lower bitrate = lower quality = smaller file size = higher compression = more playing time.

With a 10 minute clip, you might be able to use the maximum DVD bitrate of about 10,000kbps combined audio & video (more info here). But, some DVD players have trouble with very-high bitrate "burned" DVDs, so it's generally not recommended that you push it to the limit. A video bitrate of 5500-6000kbps seems to be typical for commercial DVDs. (Of course, the professionals have better MPEG encoders, and they can get better quality at lower bitrates.) At 6000kbps, you can fit about 90 minutes of video and Dolby audio on a single-layer DVD.

Here's a handy online bitrate Calculator.

Squeezing 2 hours onto a single-layer DVD may be too much compression for you, and you might not be satisfied with the quality.

[Ken Berry]

The problem is that your camera films in high definition, which is excellent quality. But when your convert it to a DVD, you are downgrading the quality to standard definition. And I am afraid that standard definition DVDs are not going to look like high definition on a 1080i HDTV. By the way, 500 MB for a 10 minute video clip sounds right for a mid quality standard definition mpeg-2 using a bitrate of around 6000 kbps. But as Doug has said, you would need an even lower bitrate than that -- down around 4500 kbps -- to squeeze 2 hours on a single layer DVD. And you would definitely not like that quality on your HDTV.

You should also note that you can't compare home made DVDs with commercial films on DVD. Those are produced using equipment which costs hundreds of thousands of dollars, which do multiple passes over the video to optimise its quality, and then finally the video is pressed into the discs, not burned as we have to do at home.

[tmacdonald]

Thanks, the 2 hour thing was about the professional stuff. What should I render in for homemade DVD's - h.264?

Tim

[Ken Berry]

As Henry Ford might have said, for a DVD, you can use any kind of video you like as long as it's mpeg-2!

In fact, that's not quite right -- you can also use mpeg-1, but that is worse quality. But the international DVD standard mandates mpeg-2 to be used for a video DVD. Moreover, it has to be within certain limits -- its combined video and audio bitrate, for instance, cannot exceed 10,000 kbps, but in practice most stand-alone home DVD players have difficulty if the video bitrate is over 8000. For home DVDS, the audio can only be LPCM, mpeg-layer 2 in PAL countries though not in NTSC (even though most NTSC players these days can play it) or Dolby two channel stereo or 5.1 Channel. And you have to get the field order correct. Yours starts life as Upper Field First, and you must maintain that throughout. Lastly, the frame size is 720 x 576 for PAL and 720 x 480 for NTSC, or fixed fractions thereof. It can be 16:9 (widescreen) if your video uses that, or 4:3.