Hello from South Florida! I shoot and edit anything from music video's to full length DVD's and Music Mixtape DVD's. Just finishing a 90 min monster dvd that has taken me now over 2 months in editing time, rush job and at the tale end my project has become alot larger than used to working with and having issues finding the best method for burning to DVD, and or the best form of compression without of course losing to much quality. My movie is now 18 gigs and i need to compress or use the right codec to get my DVD down around 4.5 gigs so i can burn my film to DVD.
Hello from south Florida
- Thread starter Concepts
- Start date
'sup 
If you're burning to regular DVD, you'll need to create an MPEG2 version of your film at some point (which will innately be much smaller than your actual project files). Most software bundles either have this option, or an "Export to DVD" option which will do the same thing.
If you are confused about software packages & options, you could always just use the free Windows DVD Maker to do a conversion for you. (Well, if you use PC's, anyway)
Dunno about BluRay or other disc formats.
If you're burning to regular DVD, you'll need to create an MPEG2 version of your film at some point (which will innately be much smaller than your actual project files). Most software bundles either have this option, or an "Export to DVD" option which will do the same thing.
If you are confused about software packages & options, you could always just use the free Windows DVD Maker to do a conversion for you. (Well, if you use PC's, anyway)
Dunno about BluRay or other disc formats.
Thanks for the advice, but wouldn't the Mpeg 2 cause me to lose alot of quality? This is a reality based dvd shot with 3 HD camera's, for a music group that is paying quite a bit of money for the DVD to go along with there album. So i really want it to keep as much quality as possible.
MPEG2 is the DVD format, essentially.
If you can burn dual-layer, you can get a higher quality - but most off-the-shelf burners on a PC are going to be single layer (4.2 gigs, or something. Look up the differences between dvd5 & dvd9, at any rate)
It doesn't matter what you originally shot on. It may look better/brighter/sharper/whatever in its original format, but at some stage you'll be ending up with an MPEG2 file if you are making a DVD. Picking appropriate export settings when generating that file will help a lot, but seriously - you are limited by the physical size that you can squish onto a disc - and the actual running-time of the final project will be a better indicator of the expected output quality than the fact it was shot on HD. (Don't forget that any screen menus, BTS footage, galleries, alternate audio tracks, etc all require their own space on that same disc, too)
What are you using right now, for this?
Thanks again i found for now i can only do dvd5 but in the future i would like to switch to a dual. I'm doing all of my editing in Studio 14, and i have a good bit of animation (cinema 4D), along with pic in pic and a good bit of green screen. So i'm going to take my raw avi that im publishing now and convert that to mpeg2 and burn it to dvd. I haven't worked on a project this large before and it's a little confusing figuring things out when you have to wait forever to render every small step you make. You have already been a really big help!