How much will fit on a DVD...?
 

I have 3 hours of 16:9 60i XL2 documentary footage that I'm cutting in FCE and then iDVD -- when done, I wonder if this will fit on one standard single layer DVD?

-- peer

Its possible to cram 3 hours on a single layer DVD disc, but your data rates will have to be set so low that image quality WILL suffer. Nasty macroblocking and motion artifacts will all be present and amplified. If you absolutely need to fit everything on one disc and keep the level of quality relatively reasonable, you'll have to cut your length down to 2 hours. Perhaps even less if you're adding a DVD menu.

The other option is to just use two DVDs, or invest in some DL DVD discs. Dual layers are more expensive, and take longer to burn, but it all comes down to what you actually need. Hope this helps!

It depends also on how much motion and such is going on in your videos. If its not a whole lot you can get a fairly good looking DVD if your encoder is good.

The bitrate you are looking at for 3 hours is about 3126 for video and 256 for mpeg audio.

As Shawn said, if you need higher quality go with 2 DVDs.

Well, I've now managed (with quite a bit of effort) to edit down my videos from 3 hours to 2 hours and 15 min -- but as you can see below, I'm yet a mere 100MB over to fit it onto this DVD.

Since I can't trim the footage any further, I tried to compress one of the longer files a little in FCE (using its "Quicktime Conversion") but after a few hours of processing, it hangs every time (yes, I have ample computing power and disk space).

I wonder if anyone can give me a pointer or suggestion on how to cram those last minuscule 100Mb onto this DVD before I'm going completely nuts.

Here's the info window from iDVD:

I am not familiar with the editing with FCP very much but the bitrate you need is 4190 k/bits a second for the video and 224 kbit/s for the Audio in mpeg format. Another trick I have used which is PC based (maybe you have boot camp or something?) is to burn the disk as a dual layer. I then use DVD Shrink to compress it back down to 4.3gb. Its very fast and keeps the quality when it does not have to compress much.