Author a DVD from AVCHD files

[Delta123]

Hi all,

I find this forum and its members so really helpful, that I wonder if you could help me with another query.
Now that Mercalli pro is working fine I'm trying to put my .mts files (AVCHD) which I downloaded from my Sony Camcorder on DVD.
The files I want to process are rather big (almost 17GB altogether) since they are from a public performance of a local orchestra.
I want to give away these discs to some of the members and since I do not know, if everyone has a BluRay player I want to put it on a nicely authored DVD (8.5GB of course).
But whatever I'm trying in my VS2021 Ultimate to get these on disc, the quality is poor. I'm already experimenting for almost 3 days: convert every clip to MP4 (.mvs) which is in fact small but of poor quality, trying several project settings, converting files to DVD quality (.mpg) first, producing an imge and burn the, etc.
None of these tests produced a result nice to watch.
Altogether I have 41 .mts files with an overall amount of 16.9GB. These files cover 3 performances within the same concert. What I want to achieve is, to produce a DVD with the first clip as introduction followed be a menu offering these 3 perfomances.
Ideally this should be on 1 disc. I could produce 3 DVDs containing one performance each, but in this case there would be no menu from which you could access all performances. And juggling with three discs is also not very handy.
The last possibility would be to author a BluRay, but as I said I'm not sure if every one has an appropriate player.

So my question is the following:
How can I bring my AVCHD files on a DL DVD with reasonable quality ? I know, that compressing/shrinking is not possible without a loss of quality, but maybe I'm missing something or I'm follwoing the wrong proceduire at all.
Any help is highly appreciated.

Regards
Delta

[canuck]

When creating DVDs, the source file size is not that important. What really matters is the total time length of your video. A standard (4.3GB) DVD can only hold about 60 minutes of "best" quality video. The video format on the DVD is always mpg.
Using a DL DVD, you can get almost double on the disc but then your members must also have a DVD player that plays double-sided DVDs.

Have you considered putting the video o a USB stick? Most newer TVs are able to play USB videos.

[Ken Berry]

The other thing to bear in mind is that even if you have a double sided blank DVD, successive versions of Video Studio have had difficulty recording to them. In my memory, no one has succeeded, or if they have, there have been very few of them.

Canuck has already mentioned the importance of the length of what you are wanting to burn. You have told us it is three performances, but you don't tell us how long they run for. If it's an hour total, or under, then you can burn the DVD at the best quality using a bitrate of 8000 kbps. If the performances are well over an hour but under 90 minutes, then you burn using around 6000 kbps and if up to two hours, with a bitrate of 4000 kbps -- though that would give you relatively poor quality no better than a VHS tape. Depending on these performances, you might need to think of two or perhaps three separate DVDs, one for each performance in order to use the highest quality bitrate possible for a DVD.

As canuck has also said, the format used for DVDs is always standard definition mpeg-2, so no point in creating mp4 or anything else from your original AVCHD. Your main problem is that your AVCHD will probably have a bitrate of at least 15,000 or 16,000 kbps, but probably much higher. As such it is extremely good, high quality video. But you would be producing new video which can be no more than 8000 kbps and possibly lower or much lower. Bitrate essentially governs quality, so you will be reducing quality fairly severely regardless of whether you divide up the performances onto separate DVDs in order to maintain the 8000 kbps maximum bitrate.

Canuck's advice about USB stick drives is a good one. A lot of people these days -- myself included -- have not burnt a DVD (or Blu-Ray disc for that matter) for years. USB stick drives, especially the ones around 8GB, have fallen dramatically in price. You could burn the performances to them in the original high quality AVCHD format, and most flat screen TVs these can play them perfectly.