How to fit Movie onto DVD?

trentsteel

OKay I have a 17.7 GB, 125 minute movie I made in Adobe Premier Pro that I need to get onto a 7.5 GB DVD.


I used DV and 44.1 MHZ sounds in standard setting (not widescreen)


I want to compress without losing audio quality at all. I have heard FLAC is a good codec for this.

Problem is, how do I compress the audio in flac and then join it back up to the movie. Or is that what I do?

I am currently compressing the entire project into MPEG2DVD format. Does this make my file size smaller or what do I do after I have changed it into this format?




P.S. If you need more information to answer my question, please let me know and I can provide the details.

EDIT: Also, of course I want to avoid losing any more quality than I have to--video-wise--because this DVD is going to be used to be shown on a screen about 15 feet tall.

EggyToast

Do you want this DVD to be playable in a regular DVD player? Or is it going to be played back on a laptop/computer that will have the appropriate codecs?

If you want it to be playable on a DVD, you should use a DVD authoring program. The standard settings are an mpeg2 video file and an audio file in 48khz. If you've got a raw DV file, you'll be able to fit it on a regular DVD at DVD size without any problem, as 125min is no problem, esp. for dual layer.

trentsteel

OKay it took eight hours but it worked. I believe it is being played on a standard DVD player that is hooked up to a projector.

I was worried about using 48mhz because in the past when I export my movie at that rate it messed up the sound.


No I'm not sure what to do .

There are two seperate files, one for the audio and one for the video and some third file called MCSES. How to put on DVD now?

EggyToast

you need to mux them together into a .vob file. Again, an authoring program will do that for you.

the audio sampling rate (44.1 or 48 khz) depends on the source rate and how it's synced to the audio. As in, if you take a video file that was recorded with the audio at 44.1, and then just change the audio rate w/o reconverting the video, your audio will gradually drift out of sync.

I assume you're on Windows, which I haven't used for DVD authoring in a few years. I had great luck using an app called DVD-Lab, which not only is great for discerning the correct/best audio format, but makes playback and menus quite easy as well. It's not as easy as just pointing a program at a .dv file, and there may be better options out there nowadays. I'm not sure what comes bundled with Premiere.

Anyway, the DVD authoring program will mux your audio and video files together, and you can set up a DVD to just play the video file upon insertion into a player, skipping the need for menus etc. The resolution of DVDs is 720x480; I forget what the max bitrate is. Do you have DVD-RWs? They're fantastic for testing a DVD burn, as you can let the computer mux the files and then burn the DVD, and then just test it right on the computer, and if it sucks you just change some settings and try again.

trentsteel

Well, when I export to DVD directly from Premier it takes about 12 hours to render, transcode and then burn the thing (it only takes about 10 min to actually burn it) so trying different settings over and over isn't really an option since I have to hand this in to the theater early next week.


I just watched my first DVD burn. The video isn't stellar but it's definitely passable.


The audio part of the file is actually quite small compared to the rest of it, I wonder if there's a way to maximize audio quality?

EggyToast

That timeframe is pretty normal, at least on Windows. My dual G5 mac did in 45 minutes what it took my amd 64 Windows machine 3 hours, and the chips were at the same clockrate. So 12 hours isn't too surprising.

If you're doing it all in premiere, I'd imagine there's a setting for maximum quality, or something similar. You've got 4-5 days, so check the manual or help PDF about DVD rendering and do a few tests overnight. If you've got one that's "passable," then that means that any improvement is a bonus, but the hard work is done. Unfortunately, I don't know much of anything about the settings in Premiere so I can't help past that point.

nexuscrawler

Be sure you're not compressing the original then compressing it again in the DVd program. Go from the original DV file.