It's about size!
 

Hey Folks,

I am trying to export a 2.5 hour video thats 40gigs onto a DVD... (4.7 gigs) I have cleaner and Vegas 5 - does anyone know which compression I should use that will keep the picture and audio nice?

Michael Estepp

Well you have the following choices:

Video:
- Full resolution MPEG2: CBR or VBR
- Half resolution MPEG2: CBR or VBR
- Half resolution MPEG1: CBR (only probably)

Audio:
- Uncompressed PCM
- Dolby Digital AC3
(there are more, but we'll leave it at that)

2.5 hours is a lot to fit on a 4.7 gig DVD. At least do your audio
compression with AC3 at 384 kbps so that takes the least
amount of space.

Half resolution MPEG2 or MPEG1 will not look that great but
should easily let you fit 2.5 hours.

If you want the full resolution MPEG2 you will need a very good
encoder (like Canopus ProCoder) with multi pass VBR encoding
and pray it works out good enough. It isn't a lot of bits left for
video. Trial and error should give you an idea on how good it
can be done.

you should be able to roughly calculate the average bitrate required to make that footage fit, then run short test encodes per rob's suggestion.

the type of source footage that you are using will have a big impact on whether or not it'll all fit, so do your test on the most difficult part of the footage.