I've finished the first disc of Fellowship and it came out at 2gigs with a CQof 75 and audio at 384. I converted the AC3 audio because I wanted to cut the bit of black at the end of the first disc and the list of fan club members at the end of the second. I find it safer to just let TMPGenc encode the audio (with Lame plugin) along with the movie so I don't loose sync when I cut bits. I'm doing disc 2 with the same settings and hoping it comes in at around 2 gigs as well.

The first disc looks great on my monitor and I'm just waiting for the second part to finish so I can check the burned DVD on my TV. My only concern with picture quality is that black often looks much better on my monitor than on my TV (also concerned about some bleeding from the smoke and ash on the Mt. Doom in the begining).

My question involves the anamorphic aspect of the movie. When I play the first disc with my ATI DVD player is stretches it to the right aspect ratio (I left both Source/Destination Anamorphic in FitCD) but the preview in SpruceUp is elongated. Does anyone know if it will be anamorphic when I burn it?

Also, in SpruceUp can I just put both mpegs in one after another and have them play, or should I try and join them into one big mpeg before I bring them into SpruceUp?

Thanks for any help...I'm almost there with my first KDVD (just as you guys are getting the KVCD templates to the point where you almost don't need a DVD burner). =)

For those interested...

I ended up joining the mpeg files into one big mpeg. I imported to Spruce Up and authored with it (adding chapter points manually). I found a link on Doom9 about Spruce not exporting anamorphic correctly and a fix using IFOedit.

At CQ of 75 the two DVDs came in at 2 gigs each and fit on my DVD-r with no trouble. The result was not as good as I'd hoped but I think I've become too picky. I lent it to someone else and they thought it looked great. I think I had fluxsmooth set too high. People looked a little flat to me, and there were some muddy bits in dark scenes with smoke ect.

If I had gone for non-anamorphic with 4/3 letterboxed I likely would have done better. A great learning experience though.

Hi m0rdant,

Next time, try FaeryDust + FluxSmooth or FaeryDust + C3D

-kwag