I am finishing up editing a live concert which will be a little shy of three hours long. I want to get it all on two 4.7g DVDs. I am not willing to sacrifice quality so if anything will be noticable by the average consumer, Ill do three DVDs.

First question. What endoder is recomended for video? I have heard Canapus Procoder thrown around alot but its also fairly expensive. However if its the end all be all must have Ill try to get it. Is there anything else slightly equal for cheaper?

Question two. Is it true I should convert the audio to ac3 to fit more stuff? I have used this before and have been satisfied with audio quality.

The software I have now is:

Sony Vegas 5
Adobe Premiere 1.5
Adobe Audition

Do I need something else to:
A. Encode better
B. Convert to ac3 if needed.

Thanks!

a. yes, Canopus Procoder is recommended, but costs some money. Another very good (but more difficult [to learn]) encoder that is quite cheap is TMPGEnc (www.tmpgenc.net)

b. no, the included AC3 encoder in the Sony set is just fine


I would encode in AC3 as well, far more bandwidth efficient and
no-one (as in consumers) will hear a difference.

Do a search on this board, enter my name in the search by user
name box and enter TMPGEnc in the search by keyword box.
This should give you a ton of threads on me talking about mpeg
encoders and threads that point to guides on how to make the
best from TMPGEnc (you can download a demo).

Thank you much. Just what I needed to hear.