[zeebe]

Hi, our school just got a G4 733 with SuperDrive last spring. I brought it home for the summer to make a DVD of my 8 month old daughter. I have input a 2 hour tape, and after cutting and editing, it is down to 1:33:44. I will be using DVD Studio Pro that was donated with the computer, which tells me to use QuickTime to make the .mov to a m2v file (mpeg2). When I click on options, it says it will be a 7.4 gig file, I can move the bitrate down to 4.7 making it a 4.0 gig file but how bad will that hurt the quality? Also, how do move makers get a 3 hour movie on a DVD and I can't even get 1 1/2 hour video on there? Any help would be appreciated!! Also, is there a DVD Studio Pro for beginners guide somewhere on the net? Thanks !!

[SirCastor]

Originally posted by zeebe:
<STRONG>Hi, our school just got a G4 733 with SuperDrive last spring. I brought it home for the summer to make a DVD of my 8 month old daughter. I have input a 2 hour tape, and after cutting and editing, it is down to 1:33:44. I will be using DVD Studio Pro that was donated with the computer, which tells me to use QuickTime to make the .mov to a m2v file (mpeg2). When I click on options, it says it will be a 7.4 gig file, I can move the bitrate down to 4.7 making it a 4.0 gig file but how bad will that hurt the quality? Also, how do move makers get a 3 hour movie on a DVD and I can't even get 1 1/2 hour video on there? Any help would be appreciated!! Also, is there a DVD Studio Pro for beginners guide somewhere on the net? Thanks !!</STRONG>

The Reason that Movie Makers can put 3 hours (or more) on a DVD is because they've got better (Read bigger) Discs. Apple Supposedly just came out with a disc that'll hold 90 minutes, I don't know much about it. That was at MWNY, which means we probably won't see it until we get iDVD2. Hollywood DVD makers are also capable of writing to both layers of a DVD. Consumer DVD writers have been unable to accomplish this as of yet.

The closest I was able to find on any kind of guide was here. It's not really a tutorial, but I walks through parts of the program...
Hope that helps

[buchrob]

You can check out an excellent resource site at www.dvdmadeeasy.com

One reason why you will bump your head against a one hour limit is that Apple's software does not allow for dynamic compression, i.e. one compression rate is applied for your whole movie. It's a limitation that makes the software less expensive and a little more consistent and predictable to use.

Commercially-released films can compress different scenes at different rates. Scenes with relatively less detail and motion (sunsets, big sky, etc) can be compressed more compactly than others without sacrificing perceptible quality. However, to so do requires analyzing each image and possibly several compression passes before the DVD is final. If a film is being released commercially, no one is going to complain if rendering is going to take an extra few hundred hours because the economic rewards will be large in the end and the end purchaser has become accustomed to having special features added, so the space has to be made available.

I don't think too many people would pay extra for a pro-sumer product that would involve tying up the computer for hours on end just to fit an extra twenty minutes of your home movies on a single disc.

[FD]

Commercial DVDs are generally dual layer thus giving them 9.4gigs as opposed to the 4.7gigs that DVD-Rs have(actually it's about 8.8g vs. 4.4). They also use multi-pass, dynamic, variable scene to scene compression. The MPEG-2 compression plugin for quicktime that comes with DVD Studio Pro is an adjustable constant bit-rate, single-pass compressor. That being said, however, a contant bit-rate of around 5Mb/sec will look reasonably good. Even the scenes with LOTS of motion will still look better than VHS. You'd be suprised at how often the bit-rate of your favorite movie is in the 2-3Mb/sec range. If you want to take the time you can change the bit-rate from scene to scene. I won't go into the the entire explantion here(unless someone is really interested)but the brief version is this-output each scene seperately and do the appropriate level of compression, then import them into DVDSP and build the disk combining all the scenes.