Dvd architect for 1 hour video in dvd

[Marcus Martell]

Hallo my dear friends,

could i ask you what are the best settings to render 59 minutes of video on a dvd with DVDARCH?
I'm starting from an MXF file in 1080 25p and now i'm going to render in Mpg2 DVDARchitect Pal Widescreen. Settings you suggest me to have a great qualiti in video and audio?
Many thanks

MM

[Christopher Young]

Look at the two pictures below. One is for a constant bit-rate DVD of 59 minutes and the other is for a variable bit-rate 59 minute DVD. This is for 4.7GB DVDs. You didn't say how many menus this DVD will have. The calculations below are for a one-page menu only. If you need more menus you will have to recalculate the bit rates. These calculations also include one stereo Dolby track encoded at 192Kb/s.

Just download Mark's DVD Bit Rate Calculator. It's a safe download. Always leave a minimum of 3% space on the DVD regardless of how long your file is. In reality, it's best to leave a "Safety Margin" of 5% to be truly safe with most DVD players. If your DVD is 59 minutes and 22 seconds fill in the actual length of your video down to the second. This is important to get the maximum quality on the disc allowing for the Safety Margin you have set. Make sure you calculate how many menus you will have because again they will affect the calculations. I've used Mark's calculator, it's called "bitcalc110" for years now and in 99% of cases it has delivered accurate calculations with good results.

If you are using Vegas I would suggest you render out both your DVD Widescreen video track and your 192Kb/s Dolby AC3 audio track from the Vegas DVD Presets. Make sure they both files have the same name. Once they are loaded into DVD Architect DVDA will build the DVD in just a few minutes.

Alternatively, you can just let DVDA do all the encoding and rendering work but it will take a lot longer and whilst the quality will be good Vegas will do a better job in making the files for DVDA.

Chris Young

Download "bitcalc110"
https://www.moviestudiozen.com/image...bitcalc110.zip
.

[Marcus Martell]

Chris many thanks! Just today i found out you replyed to my post. In the dvd there won't be any menus, it will be a single movie render!

[Christopher Young]

In that case, the numbers in the two images above will work fine for no menus. If I'm doing 60 minute renders to go to 4.7GB DVDs I will normally use the constant bit rate setting of 9600. This should give you the best overall quality. From memory, I think DVD Architect's standard bit rate is 8500. Obviously this will work and give you a very large safety margin.

The less space left on a disc means there is a slightly higher chance of the DVD not playing correctly. This tends to be more of a problem with older DVD players. I've done duplication runs of 4000-7000 discs using these settings and had something like 0.3% failure returns. Often those failures were fixed by just using a different brand of DVD blank media and using the existing settings. Good luck.

Chris Young

[David Dalton]

Hello Chris

Going back to an earlier comment:
"If you are using Vegas I would suggest you render out both your DVD Widescreen video track and your 192Kb/s Dolby AC3 audio track from the Vegas DVD Presets. Make sure they both files have the same name. Once they are loaded into DVD Architect DVDA will build the DVD in just a few minutes."

Would this apply to any length of DVD? I use Vegas and have always used Mark's bitrate calculator rather than the Vegas DVD presets.The DVDs I make are around 2 hours.

David

[Christopher Young]

Hi David

Yes I do for any length of DVD.

DVDA will convert the audio files to AC3 Dolby basic if you leave the job up to DVDA. All versions of Vegas after v13 will do the same so not a lot of difference quality wise but DVDA is so slow in its encoding and the longer the project is the more its MPEG-2 video encoding suffers as it uses a pretty basic set of MPEG-2 encoding parameters which aren't optimized for really long DVDs. Anything much over an hour twenty and your video bit rate really starts to drop. As Mark's bit rate calc indicates. I find if your video bit rate is getting much under 6500 the encoding needs to be very good to keep an acceptable level of quality. Especially if it's sports or dance with a lot of movement. Talking heads not a problem.

I always render the files out as separate audio and video files in whatever software I'm using to prepare the compliant files. Generally, though, I'm using Mainconcept's TotalCode Studio these days for most professional encoding jobs where Dolby Digital is required because of the Pro encoding parameters that are available. Many of which we had in Vegas v13 but lost in v14 and on due to evolving licensing arrangements as there was less and less demand from users for optical encoding.

TotalCode also has very highly configurable parameters for most broadcast codecs both audio and video. Something none of the current crop of NLEs have regardless of brand. But then it is a dedicated piece of encoding software, so you would expect that. For DVD's TotalCode's dual pass slow #31 delivers the best Elementary MPEG2 streams I've ever made. Noticeable quality improvements in the video, especially as the run time durations increase. You can even force "I" frames on rapid scene changes, where fast movement can cause pixelation.

Remember the old v13 Dolby Pro which had Dialog normalization? That was very useful on certain encode jobs. See below.

Chris Young

https://www.mainconcept.com/totalcode-studio

https://f.hubspotusercontent40.net/h...g%20Basics.mp4

[David Dalton]

Chris

Thanks for that information. I'll try it on a show I'm doing now.

David.