Inquiring about best way to produce DVD with 3 hours using an 8.5 DVD. I have DVD Architect 5.0 but have never used it. All tips and suggestions appreciated.

Sure you can put 4 hours on a single layer DVD but the quality will be awful! Is there no way you can use 2 x DVD's and offer a "set" ...a single DVD case and a double DVD case are almost the same price so your only extra cost is 30 cents for a disk and some printer ink??

I do all my weddings with a DVD set and to my clients they see it as better value for money.

You can of course also burn a dual layer DVD but those often tend to have compatibility issues and are much slower to write too.

Are there a lot of disks involved ???

Thanks Chris. Hers the deal, 4 Nutcracker shows, 2 on Saturday and 2 on Sunday, each show about 90 minutes. My plan was to get 2 90-minute shows on a DL disc. I have committed my price to "all shows" for X amount. The plan was to include a 2 disc set in 1 double DVD case. And not surprisingly, my plan was not thought fully through :)

Are all of the 4 shows different? I also have done these type of shows but usually it's one show that is repeated 3 times in 2 days so I shoot the first show the first day and if the performances where ok and my camerawork was good as well I don't go back, if one of the 2 was not so good then I can still catch the second show or the day after to repeat shooting if necessary. So in my case it's just one show that's usually around 2 hours that goes onto 1 disc.

no problem
tmpgenc mastering works is my fave to convert whatever to dvd format

+1 for tmpgenc, it's been rocksolid for producing dvd's ever since I got it.

Are all of the 4 shows different?
Unfortunately, yes they are different. Some dancers same but lead roles changed each performance. I have obligated my self to furnish all 4 shows.


no problem
tmpgenc mastering works is my fave to convert whatever to dvd format
Not familiar with this but will check it out, is it a compressing tool or authoring tool? (or both?)

You might be able to just lower the bitrate and get 180 minutes on one normal DVD? I do Realty condition reports and drop the bitrate from the normal Sony Vegas DVD template MPEG2 file down to an average bit rate of 4000 ...that comes out to under 1.5GB for an hour of footage so at 4000 you just might get 180 minutes on the DVD ... Encoded at 4000 the footage is pretty respectable so I would try a smaller chunk of footage (say 30 mins) and see what that takes up on the DVD ....To be honest I have never dropped below 4000 so I cannot tell you the quality loss but as long as it's acceptable it's worth a try??

Remember parents have a lot lower expectations than us guys who pixel peep so that could quite easily think it's awesome ... Are you shooting in full HD or 4K ???

Having a slightly lower bitrate and supplying just one twin set for 4 shows will make your life a lot easier so I would sacrifice a little time and try a lower bitrate first ..if that looks awful then go to plan "B" ....You never said how many DVD's you are likely to duplicate so doing a 2 x set will save you tons of time compared to 1 DVD per show .. try it!!

Great tips and suggestions everyone, I think I am almost there. I rendered VBR with 6 as average and got a "good" quality video and 4.07 gb for 1.5 hours. This works great BUT, I have no audio. I checked the template and saw "Include Audio" was unticked. I ticked and ran again but still no audio. For simplicity I would love to simply include audio on the video track. Any thoughts?

It's unclear to me whether you're working in DVD-A or TMPGenc at this point...

If you're in Vegas/DVDA, the audio render is typically done separately as a Dolby AC-3 out of Vegas. If it has the same name and is in the same folder as the video file, DVDA will pick it up automatically with the video file.

Edward Troxel's newsletters (http://jetdv.com) describe this workflow in detail, and include a bitrate chart that will help size your video renders.

I just finished my carnival project and I have a movie length of 3hours 35minutes (215 minutes)
I'm going to make DVD9 and blu ray of it.

I rendered the finished 50P 1920x1080 AVCHD files from sony vegas 13 to the same format.
Next I put those files into tmpgenc authoring works 5 and make a menu.

Because I need blu ray and DVD I made first a blu ray disc (at this moment without burning it)
It took more than 12 hours to render it! I took 2 pass VBR because it's a long video to put on 25G blu ray.

After that I had choosen "open with conversion" to make a dvd.
I changed the average bitrate to 4850 kb/s. And now it will take more than 5 hours to make the DVD9??

I thought with this conversion I would be very fast going from blu ray to dvd, not?

Before I did this I already burned a rewritble dvd with a 4850 kb/s for testing the quality. I looked good enough to me on a part with lots of movement. Didn't see to much compression.

But is my workflow the right one to make blu ray and dvd from the same project?

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