6hrs or AVCHD Footage to 2 DVD's Using DSP4
 

Hello sorry if i'm posting this in the wrong section.

I just finished transcoding my 6hours of Event footage from my new Sony NXCAM AVCHD camcorder in 30p. I will be using DSP4 and Compressor in order to author my footage onto DVD. I know that there are several encoding settintgs in DSP4 that allow you to select DVD 90min, 120min etc. Also there is an H.264 codec for 90min, 120min, as well as an MPEG-2 codec for 30min.

I have educated myself on the process and it all seems very straight forward. However it has raised a question in my mind of how i will manage to Author my 6hours of HIGH QUAILTY footage onto as few DVD discs as possible. Originally i had planed on burning 6 dvd's of 1hour each, however this seems very unprofessional to me as i want to deliver the best product i can to my client.

Is there any way that i can Author this LONG 6hour event onto 2 or 3 Dvd's using DVD studio Pro 4 rather than having to break up the whole even into 6 of them?

Any help would be great. Thanks in advance.

Well, part of the answer is "it depends". This is not specific to DVD Studio or compressor, they're good programs, but this figuring applies to any software that you used to make DVD-Video discs.

Up to about 70 minutes you can use the max video-only datarate of 8Mbps, if your audio is AC-3 encoded, and be pretty compatible across almost all dvd players. (This is figuring single-layer DVD-R of standard size, 4.7GB, encoded to the DVD-Video standard of MPEG-2.)

120 minutes = 4.8Mbps.
180 minutes = 3.1Mbps.

How will your content look at 3.1 vs. 4.8Mbps? It depends... noise plays havoc on encoding. High-motion subjects (sports) demand more bitrate. Shakey hand-held camera means more bitrate.

I usually figure on 90-120 minutes per disc, but, some content is good at 180/disc. I don't know of anyone doing more than 180 minutes per disc.

I'd test. Media is cheap. Throw 2 hours of video at DVD-Studio, give it the full 1920x1080 and let it encode to standard def, and see how it looks.

Unless you're using something like 5 pass Cinema Craft encoding, I doubt any other encoder can give you 3 hours of 'high quality' video on a DVD, even if you go double layer, which I would not recommend.

Than again... 'high quality' means different things to different people...