movie length

[DaveM]

Can anyone point me in the right direction please? I'm trying to get to grips with producing my own video work on DVD.

I'm using Aobe Pemiere 6.5 to edit my footage and also to output to MPEG.

My problem is that I don't know what to set the compression to so that the mpeg file will fit on to a single 4.7 Gb DVD.

Can anyone point me to a source of information that will give me this.

At the moment I'm producing MPEG files on a trial-and-error basis which is a bit frustrating given the time it takes to encode about 2 hours of video on any of the encoding software packages. I only find out the file is too big when I pull it into Nero to write to the disc.

Also can anyone suggest a bottom limit for the compression before the loss in quality becomes unacceptable. I want to maintain it to about the level of S-VHS.

Thanks in advance

DaveM

[ashy]

There are only 2 ways to determin the output file size.
One is to use a CBR enocding method, the other is to use a 2 pass or multiples pass method.
Either way you will need a bitrate calculator to give you the settings you need for encoding.

You can find many bitrate calculators by doing a search on google.com

As for your compression question it's difficult to answer. It all depends on your footage and whether you want to stay within allowed DVD specs.

2000 Kb/s is the minimum bitrate for DVD and 9.8 the maximum. Anywhere in between and you're OK.

You should easily be able to get a 2 hour movie on 1 DVD with very good quality using the standard settings and more if you reduce the bitrate.

Also my advice is NOT to use Adobe premier to output your MPEG unless you have the CCE plugin.

Let TMPG do your encoding. This way you will acheive much better quality and more control over the file size using the wizard in TMPG.