DVD sets
 

When you folks are selling pkgs how many DVDs do you offer? I'm not talking about copies, but (especially if the ceremony is long) do you end up having to use 2 discs to deliver the product? I've been doing production for years but I've only gotten into really thinking about burning/encoding recently. In my experience, I've only been able to get around 50 minutes of video on a DVD without more compression. For most of the weddngs I've done over the years (I'm just going full time after working in and teaching TV) my finished edit ends up around 50 minutes. That time seems to work well for a finshed running time. Some folks have ceremonies that run that long (guh...). :) What to do?

How much can you fit on a DVD? Any specific compression methods I should know about. If there are already threads that cover this please let me know.


-Don

Don,

For my typical weddings, I generally give only one DVD (mutiple copies though) to the customer. The last DVD I did had 2 hours of edited, minimally compressed footage. And typically I have about an hour and a half of stuff on DVD. Two hours is basically the max I can go on a single sided DVD.

The only time I will give the customer 2 DVDs is if they buy a "extra" from me such as the Bridal Prep or Love Story package. For the bridal prep - I give them a highlight clip (over music) and then the edited version of the time when I was shooting the bridal prep (usially a half hour/45 minutes of footage).

Hope that helps.
Ryan

Don,

I try to get everything onto a single layer usually as 2 hrs is more than enough in most cases... however there are times a dual layer would seem more appropriate esp in situations I'll describe below - but so far I've been able to stick w/ single layer without major issues.

Every project, I seem to fight with time and compression until I'm happy with the quality. The more motion, color changes, lighting changes, etc during the dancing causes more compression artifacts to be visible. Not a problem during the slow moving scenes of the ceremony.

An example of the range is - one time I couldnt squeeze a 60 min project onto a single layer disc... another time I was able to successfully drop a 2hr 27min one with minimum degradation.

The compression used is basically dependent on DVD Architects 'Fit to disc' option. That squeezes the most it can out of whatever size disc you use.

-Albert