how many hours of video on DVD5

Hello. I have a big series of videos of a conferences... 26 videos between 1 and 2 hours each... I have some of then on DVDs, other in DV...

I would like to put a lot of them on DVDs, as collection or something like that... I know i can use dvd studio pro, with the encode setting in 1.0 to get the highest compression of video... but i´m not sure if it compress audio too... i would like to compress video, but not audio... because its about a conferences or speech of what the videos are... in what format should I compress the videos to fit most of then in two o three DVD5 or DVD of 4.3GB... I have use DVxDVD to get the videos out of the DVDs but I don`t know in what format I have to capture them now.... I used to do it on DV... but it takes larger file size?

thanks...

I am not sure I follow completely, but a DVD5 can hold a huge amount of video if you compress it enough, or if you use MPEG1, or half D1. What you should also do is compress the audio to AC3 - it is about a tenth of the file size of AIFF or PCM audio, and yet sounds pretty much the same. Aim for a bitrate of 192 if you want this in stereo.

Have a look for a bitrate calculator, too - this will help you understand the relationship between file size and disc space. Remember, the more you compress the footage the worse it can look. If you want to get a decent visual image, use half D1 or MPEG1 (I prefer the former) which will use a much smaller file size for a pretty decent visual quality. You may need to use a compressor such as Bitvice in order to achieve Half D1, of course.

As a guide, if you use MPEG1 you can get about 5.5 hours onto a DVD5 with AC3 audio at 192kbps. Remember though that MPEG1 is not much better than VHS. Half D1 will be about the same, but slightly less.