longest DVD using DVD studio pro?

[schteevie]

I am trying to get almost 3 hours onto a DVD - it is all talking heads with a locked off camera - compresses well.
I out put a self contained movie with FCP and then lowered the encode quality in DVD studio pro 2 as much as I could.
damn thing came out to 4.8 gigs! so close.

should I compress it first in FCP?

side note: I tried burning just to see what would happen and it made me suffer through all the muxing track waiting until finally it said the disk didn't have room.
obviously - why didn't it say that right away? - I guess that is another story....

[Mike_Donis]

I think the real question is why would you waste your time trying to burn a 4.8GB file onto a source that maxes out at 4.7GB ::)



I joke ;D

[Encheval]

I assume that you use Compressor. What settings (bitrate..etc) are-you using ?
You can maibe save some space by tweaking audio.

Nico

[kai]

Did you compress your audio with A-Pack? That should save you some room...

[Loki]

I jsut finished a project where I put a main feature that was 188min onto the DVD..

plus an entire audio commentary on that... and also about 10min of extra features... it is definately doable..

but I had to endless play around with bitrates to get a reasonable quality level... it took a long long time to find a decent balance between size and quality.... and i still think it my project looks far too compressed in certain scenes..

I used One Pass VBR of 2.9Mbps to 5Mbps.... and used A.Pack to compress audio into 192Kbps Dolby Digital...

it can be done.. but it requires much playing around.. and one other thing:

DVD Studio Pro does not report the size of your menus in it's little space indicator... so you may end up going insane like me wondering why you 4.6GB Disc won't burn... only to realize you have 400MB worth of menus..

also.. that 4.7GB on the DVD assumes you are using 1GB = 1000MB not 1024MB...

cheers