[Garrett]

Question 1

I captured some footage which was about 90 minutes long, and took up 6 Gb plus room on the HD. So if I wanted to burn this to a DVD disc it would not fit.
I captured it using a Pinnacle capture card and Studio 9 software in MJPEG better mode. I know the DVD’s the film studios burn theirs on are of a bigger capacity but surly not that big they can fit a 3 hours plus film with some extras and different languages. So how come I can only fit about 1 hour on my disc?
Is it something to do with the bit rate?
Is there some software that reduces the size yet keeps the quality?

Question 2

Is there any software that will allow me to make a disc up with menus, say for footage shoot on certain days and with in them allow me to have chapters? Similar to what they have for TV series DVD’s. I have Studio 9 and Nero CD and DVD burning software.

Question 3

Is there software that will allow me to capture footage captured at different times and merge them?

Hi Garrett,

Question One : How about DVD Shrink this will shrink large DVD's to fit.

Question Two : There are lots of DVD authoring tools out there, i guess it is just a case of trying them out, lots of them enable you to make fancy menus and stuff. Have a look here

Question Three : Have a look at Boilsoft's joiner/merger

I am just learning all this sort of stuff, I'm mainly interested in making fancy slideshows with music and transitions etc and I find this site very useful indeed. The forums and the guides are all very good.


VideoHelp

HTH
Nicola

[Garrett]

Hi Nicola

Thanks for the helping me again.

With regards the DVD Shrink I have down loaded it but it will not look at the file the Pinnacle software made as it is not an image file. Do you know how to convert such a video file to an image file, without splitting it in two burning it to a disc then loading it back?

[Zef]

Vegas DVD Architect will do questions 1 and 2, I use it a lot to author my movies.

question 3 is a little harder, I tried to join some AVI files up using a AVI joiner prog, but it didnt work, I think Its because of the MPEG version or something. I still working on that.

Also to answer you Q about fitting on a disk, a movie DVD is dual layer and twice the capacity. - to get a normal movie on a 4.7GB disk you need DVDshrink to strip out the extras etc.

[MarkE19]

1. The problem here is that you have captured the video in a highly compressed, but probably not DVD complient format. Uncompressed capture would be 14Gb per hour, so the 90 minute video would take 21Gb. MPEG-2 comes in many different flavours, only 1 of which is DVD compatable. Studio 9 has DVD authoring software included, but you will normally only get 1 hour on a DVD-R.
You should be able to author you footage, but save it to your disk as a DVD image rather than burn to a DVD. Then DVD shrink should work as it will all be in the correct format.

2. I use Ulead DVD MovieFactory 3 that does all you want here I think. There are many others all that come under the heading of DVD authoring programs.

3. You should be able to merge footage on the timeline in any editing software, including Studio 9. But it should be captured as AVI and not MPEG.

Mark.

[Garrett]

Thanks for the replies :

What is the maximum time and in what format will a DVD hold for:
a) a Hi8 camcorder tape.
b) Stored footage on a VHS tape.

A question slightly of tack, haw can I take a snapshoot of some footage, I tried pressing the Prt Scr key but on putting it in Photoshop I just get a blank picture.

[MarkE19]

A DVD always uses MPEG-2 format video. The length of video you can get onto a DVD will be set by the authoring software that converts the file from AVI (or whatever) to MPEG-2. At a fairly good quality you should still be able to get 2 hours on a disk. Obviously not all MPEG encoders are equal. The better the encoder (which normally means more expensive) the lower the bit rate you can get away with.
As all DVD video is in MPEG-2 the amount the DVD can hold has nothing to do with the origional source ie Hi8, VHS etc. In fact the lower the quality of the origional footage, the higher the bitrate that is required to get reasonable results on a DVD. So a VHS source for example may only be able to be an hour on the DVD, where a DV source will be fine with 2+ hours on the DVD.

You should be able to take a still image from your video within the editing program. I only use Premiere, so don't know how to do it in the software that you use.

Mark.