HELP: Fitting 3 Hours onto DVD-9

Hello,

I am creating a 2-DVD set of a 13-episode television series. Each episode is (almost exactly) 30 minutes long. I'm trying to put 6 episodes on one DVD-9 and 7 on the second DVD, and it's just not working. I thought I'd ask for some guidance.

Each episode is shot and edited in HDV on FCP. My compression process is what Ken Stone recommends here: [www.kenstone.net]

I've generally had success using this process, with little loss in quality. But this is the first time I've tried to fit more than 3 episodes onto a DVD.

First, I used the Compressor Presets for DVD Best Quality 150 minutes. The video ended up looking horrible. Even the slightest facial movements got all pixellated.

The second time, I used the DVD Best Quality 90 minutes preset, which I have used before and which usually end up looking great. But 6 episodes compressed at this rate just won't fit. It's about .3 MB over the available space on the disk.

Right now, I've got 6 MPEG-2s at 1.28 GB a piece (one is 1.18). Six AC3s that vary in size from 38.52 MB to 41.73 MB. My first play warning is only 130 KB and my DVD menus are small, only about 120 KB. Each episode has English subtitles, but as I understand it, these don't take up much space.

The thing that gets me is, I have a 2-DVD set in front of my--Samantha Brown's Passport to Great Weekends. There are nine 21-minute episodes on each disk!!

I know that lowering the bit rate is key. I also know that having multiple audio streams in these projects creates larger files. Many of these episodes have multiple audio streams, for music, sound effects, voice overs, ambient sound, etc. (All files used are AIFFs.) So I know this is an issue. However, when I look at the file sizes of the two different compression sessions, it seems that only the video files were lowered significantly. The audio files are relatively the same.

Is it possible to lower the bit rate on the AUDIO files, but to keep the video files as good as possible?

Is there something else I'm overlooking or that I might consider? Any guidance would be very appreciated. Thanks!

So - you're using Compressor, and you are using the preset settings, right? When you use the 90 minute setting you are minutely over the limit... why not 'tweak' the settings manually to reduce the max bitrate in use to something very slightly less. You'll save the .3Mb in no time.

You say you are using AC3 for the audio with your 6 MPEGs but later you say you have got AIFFs. If you have indeed got AIFFs then you should convert these to AC3 as they will be about ten times smaller, and will use far less bandwidth when played back, but sound identical to the AIFF version.

DVDSP will not do anything with AIFF files to reduce their size as AIFF (or any PCM based audio) is 'legal' on a DVD and thus DVDSP interprets it as not needing anything done. Apart from that, DVDSP itself doesn't include a Dolby Digital compression engine (but does include the QuickTime encoder). You'll have to deal with the audio when in Compressor.

If this is really just .3Mb over the limit then recovering that kind of space is pretty trivial when you convert your audio to AC3. Even if you tweak the video, it's a tiny amount to save.

Did you mean .3Gb? In which case it is slightly harder, but by converting AIFF to AC3 you'll find that much fairly quickly, too.

--

lafcpug mod

Thanks, Hal. Good idea. I ended up doing this after I posted. I'll see if it works, both with quality and size. The video files are a tad smaller.

I meant the files were AIFFs in the FCP projects. I have read that other types of sound files can also cause size issues. Sorry to confuse.

Thank you!

AC3 has never caused any issues for me in over seven years of compressing and authoring for DVD. I always convert my audio to AC3. I will also keep an aiff file just in case I need to tweak levels or make other adjustments.

In Compressor set dialog normalization to -31dBFS(audio tab) and in Preprocessing change Compression preset to none.