How best to handle compressing video to fit?
 

I just finished converting the last tape of a set which my mother wanted to give to a friend for Christmas. After editing and menus, the material was 2 hours 32 minutes long. VideoStudio said that it would not fit on a dual-layer DVD. I ended up going into the compression settings and reducing the bitrate from 8000 kbps to 7000, then 6000, then finally 5400. At that point VS said that it might fit, so that's what I'm rendering it as right now.

Mom wants to give her friend the present tonight, so The Die Is Cast. For future reference, though, what's the best way to make an extra-long video fit the disk space, and how much bitrate reduction is too much?

FWIW, after the DVD master is complete I will also be rendering the file to .MP4 at 720P and a 10K bit rate; I'll give that to her separately on a thumb drive. So the eggs are not all in the single basket.

Follow up...

Well, after two and a half hours of "converting titles," VideoStudio warned me that there was insufficient space on the disc for the burn. Since there wasn't enough time left before Mom had to leave for her evening visit, I crossed my fingers and clicked, "Proceed anyway."

Corel's programmers were apparently conservative (which is a good thing). The burn completed successfully, although the disk capacity indicator was well up into the red zone. I tested it in my own Blu-ray player before packaging it; it played successfully all the way through. Quality was perhaps not quite as good as the two other discs which were burned at 8000 Kbps, but at least as good as if you were watching the source tape on a standard VHS VCR. All in all, I'm pleased with the results and I think Mom's friend will be delighted.

I'd still like to hear ideas and recommendations for handling such a situation better in future. There are quite a few of those T-160 tapes out there (this was a Sony), and towards the end you can hear the kid's father (it was a christening video) saying how he wanted to use up all of the tape. So I'm likely to encounter this kind of problem again.

Going forward you should use the bitrate calculator from dvd-hq.info

This site allows you to enter the parameters of your video file and the size of the disk you plan to burn to, and it will tell what compression settings to use to maximize quality of your MPEG-2 encode.

Yeah that site is very useful indeed if you want to calculate a bitrate and settings manually. You may be aware and/or doing it already, but using some noise reduction through avisynth or other method, especially for chroma side of things is also very helpful for reducing compression artifacts (probably one reason why many standalone dvd-recorders had it in one form or another).

If you do the encoding manually with hcenc, it allows you to set a target size for 2-pass encoding, I think it's possible with ffmpeg as well but that may be more clunky. I don't know when it comes to others. I'm a bit surprised VideoStudio doesn't have an automatic bitrate setting. The open source dvdstyler is able to guess an appropriate one it automatically when authoring a dvd, and I've never experienced it making the DVD too large to fit. Roxio's Toast has a similar feature, but unlike with dvdstyler, I've had issues with it frequently ending up making the files too large.

Ulead has worthless calculation. It was the same with DVDWS2.

I had similar issues 20 years ago. So I learned the math. After that, I never needed a calculator. At one point, I had minutes:disc memorized, since I was cranking out up to a dozen disc authors per day. Didn't even need a pen and paper. (BTW, at the time, not sure about this exact site anymore, I learn that even calculators were off.) But these days? Yeah, I might need a calculator again, or to find my bitrate notes (which should be in the master :\Video folder)

Are you making the mistake of allowing Ulead to burn a disc? Don't do that. Author to a folder, burn folder with Imgburn.

First I've seen that recommendation; thanks for the tip. :tiphat: