more than 120 minutes on a dvd?
 

Help! I am making an instructional video, shot on a pd170. sd, 4:3
I am currently at 137 minutes of video. I am not sure I can get the finished product under 120 minutes.
I will not use a dual layer disc, or blu-ray. is it feasible to compress the video to fit? will it be noticeable? if so, how obvious?
This is going to be watched by housewives, and probably on a little kitchen tv, rather than a big screen. I know its possible to compress the video to fit, but how bad does it really look in the final product? I have searched the forums, and could not find anything discussing this, if someone could at least point me in the right direction, I would appreciate it.

Commercial DVDs come with more than 120 minutes of footage all the time, and they look great. It's very possible. I'm not sure what you use to compress or what kind of presets it has, but I would definitely do a multi-pass encode. Also, I'd use AC3 for the audio instead of uncompressed, you save a ton of space that you can use for a higher video bitrate.

Yes, but commercial dvds use dual layer. I usually do not go over 90 minutes, this is the longest project I have worked on so far. Thanks for the information about ac3, I will look into that

sure you can. For seminars I routinely go to 130 to 150 minutes on a single layer DVD. I do use AC3 audio and of course the qaulity does take a hit but nothing that won't pass muster (so to speak). Get a bitrate calculator off the web (they're free) and go from there.
Don

Why not just make one to test out and see for yourself?

Absolutely. And test it with the actual footage of your project. An action movie with fast, dynamic scenes will need more space to look good than other footage with fewer changes and movement.

Only one way to find out - go try it!

- Martin

Thanks for the replies. I am still in process with the editing, if I knew it either will or will not work would save me about 20 hours of work. rather than take a chance, I am cutting out sections to make it under 120 minutes. Thanks!

Allen,

That's a bad approach. Don't believe that when you exceed 120 minutes, you suddenly cross a magic mark where the quality drops. Whether your feature length is 119 minutes or 121 minutes will make no significant difference, because the bandwidths you can use are only marginally different. So don't try to keep it under a certain threshold at all cost. Instead, set yourself a rough goal (like 120 minutes, or 90 minutes, or whatever is appropriate for your project and will result in sufficiently high quality) - then don't worry about a few seconds or even minutes more or less.

- Martin

which approach is worse? if I market the video and find out after the fact that customers are unhappy, or there are compatibility issues, or some unknown problem, then the video must be pulled from the market completely. I cant advertise it as a 130 minute video, and later discover issues, and remove some content. however, i can remove some content now, market it, and a month or two later, after I have had time to experiment, I can add the information as a bonus to future sales. if the project was not for retail sale, I would have made a different decision.

Martin is right, fitting 120 minutes on a disc and fitting 137 minutes on a disc are not going to be significantly different in quality. Don't compromise your product in order to fit it under a certain time constraint, unless you feel that it would benefit it by speeding up the pace, or could use that extra editing, with or without the storage issues.

Thank you for your replies, I will reconsider.

For Vegas render to mpg with AC3 audio (just as a for instance) for 120 minutes the AVERAGE br is 4826000-for 137, it's 4110000-so as you can see not a hugh difference.
Go on and make your DVD cut the way you want it but get a BR calc and use it to figure the BR.
Don

You can encode the MPEG2 video for a 137 minute DVD at a higher bitrate, when using AC3 audio (even at 384kbps - 2 channel), than for a 120 minute DVD using uncompressed audio (1536kbps - 2 channel).

Two DVDs
 

A little more work and slightly higher material costs but your quality will improve significantly, especially if you shot anything higher than DV. The cost of the dual case is also slightly higher.

But you sound like you are very concerned with quality, so this might be the way to go.

Use nero if dvd-a won't let you put that much on a dvd.
Nero just gets on with fitting it on the dvd,no fussing around.

Paul.