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Understanding DVD Compression?
canyon289 asks: "My friends and I created a full length movie using a regular Sony Camcorder. After importing and editing all of the video and audio in Adobe Premiere, the exported AVI comes out to 19 gigs. The length of the movie is 90 minutes. We tried compressing it with Nero Burning Rom to a 4.7 single layer DVD but when played in a standard DVD player theres pixelation and frame skips aplenty. Does anyone know how to fit the movie into a DVD (preferably 4.7) and still maintain adequate quality?"
Just download your movie off the net. Someone will have shrunk it to fit on a CD-ROM.
</sarcasm>
Education is a better safeguard of liberty than a standing army.
Edward Everett (1794 - 1865)
Try to burn it slower, if you noticed will run smoothly in your PC's dvd player but not in home dvd-player.
The full version is pathetically slow and not very good; the bundled versions are pathetically slow, not very good, and force you to use LPCM audio. ffmpeg + mplex + dvdauthor will do nicely. And there are tools that will wrap them all together for you in some sort of graphical thing, I think :)
CCE is the standard used in the rampant legal archiving of DVDs. Best DVD encodes I've seen of any of the major products. Nero has a quick and dirty encoder that is fitting 1hr-1:30 on a DVD5 with decent quality, but CCE sets the standard.
MPEG only specifies the decoder not the encoder. So
1. Choose a quality encoder
2. Use a high quality mode (if it has one) usually this enables more MV searches
3. Use multiple passes if supported. This helps distribute the bandwidth where it is needed more.
Mencoder [part of mplayer] can encode DVDs using lavc that look [for the most part] just as good as the original on a CD. It'd be trivial to get near losslessness in the size of a DVD.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
Try exporting it into .wmv or a DivX, thats what I do when I make movies. Though, I am converting FRAPS files there, not from a camcorder.
http://www.doom9.net/
I believe iMovie and other Apple movie-making tools are able to do that from the tapes
I am Spartacus
You want a multi-pass, high quality encoder to create your output files. For video and on Windows, I suggest Tsunami Mpeg Encoder (TMPGEnc). It's been a few years since I've messed with any of this, but it was quite good and inexpensive 3-4 years ago. It does 2-pass encoding and can output any number of DVD-compatible formats.
If you're still having problems, you might try reducing the resolution. DVD supports 704(720) or 352 vertical lines. Obviously quality suffers as you reduce resolution, but if you're having problems squeezing your content onto a DVD at 720 lines, you may just get an overall increase in quality this way.
Also, you don't talk much about your audio. Is it raw audio (which is really big and uses up lots of room on the disc that could be devoted to video)? You may have good results compressing this, as well.
I like http://www.doom9.net/ for all things video/dvd/vcd. They have a number of guides which detail the various methods of compression and burning. It's pretty likely that you'll find the tips you need there.
Every time you convert it to another format, you're going to lose information.
.avi file was not using DVD-compliant MPEG-2, in which case your burning software would have to transcode it (decode the compression in the .avi file, recompress using MPEG-2 at a resolution and bit rate that would work for DVDs). Even if your video is already in a DVD-compliant subset of MPEG-2, Nero might still have decided to go ahead and transcode it again anyway, because most Windows DVD software is stupid that way.
There's a good chance that your
Like arodland said above, use ffmpeg, mplex, and dvdauthor. They might take a bit longer to learn, but they're worth the effort.
ffmpeg -i INPUT.avi -target ntsc-dvd 01.mpg /dev/dvd -dvd-video dvd
mkdir dvd
dvdauthor -o dvd -t -v 4:3 01.mpg
dvdauthor -o dvd -T
growisofs -Z
rm -r dvd 01.mpg
Basically, you need to author your DVD. Authoring takes the AVI file output of Premiere, compresses the video to MPEG2, the audio to AC3, creates menus (if you want them) and prepares and burns the entire thing. Good authoring software does a MUCH better job at compression than the crappy encoder in Nero, since these programs are designed to create only video DVDs, whereas Nero is designed to do everything (and none of it particularly well). As you're already using Adobe products, you may want to try Encore. It's their DVD authoring application. However, if you're open to other options, I highly recommend Sony DVD Architect. Both of those programs will create splendid quality results; the difference is that Adobe's Encore will give you more options (but is harder/more confusing for beginners) while Sony's DVD Architect will be much easier to learn and use (however lacks some of the fancy features that Encore provides).
Go to google, type in "dvd authoring guide" or something like that, click the links that come up, and READ THEM. This is yet another one of those pathetic Ask Slashdot questions where it's clear that the submitter hasn't bothered to do the slightest bit of research. I think it's time I submitted my "What do I need to know to get a job as a programmer?" question...
Slightly offtopic: I created a video with kino that is of mpeg2 format, in a .mpeg file. How would I author a DVD (or create a DVD style .iso) from this?
:-(
I can't seem to find a good answer with the typical google searches (too many false-positives by mentioning mpeg and mpeg2)
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
You entered the wrong url in your browser. Instead of slashdot.org try videohelp.com.
Dan East
Better known as 318230.
Hey guys. No of course its not a rip if you guys are wondering. What kind of rip would be twice the size of the commercial dvd? Please don't think youre supporting piracy by giving me suggestions. I'd really appreciate any help I can get and thank you to whoever has already given me more possible solutions. I'll also bring you up to date on what I've done. The nero compression barfs during the credit and theres pixelation everywhere. However the audio and picture stay in sync. I've also tried Winavi but there are parts where the dvd player can't play the sound or video. Does anyone know if FFmpeg or some apple program will work? It doesn't matter what operating system. Thank you
I like Womble MPEG for editing MPEG-2.
It imports AVI, uses a timeline editor with a really fast seek, and my favorite: it can do stream copy for portions you don't want edited. Then there's transitions and other bells and whistles. I use it for anything I can't do in VirtualDub/AviSynth or Nero Recode. It's also recommended in the doom9 forums, for what it's worth.
Oh yes. Im very sorry that I forgot to mention the details. Here they are. Pixels: 720 x 480 Duration: 1:30:32 Audio Bitrate: 1536 Kbps Audio Sample Size: 16 bit Audio Format: PCM Framerate: 29 frames a second (can't lower this anymore, The movie gets too choppy) Video Sample Size: 24 bit
Using a decent encoder is certainly the method of choice, but another solution, though not overly elegant, is let the DVD authoring app save an oversize file set (if it will let you--Ulead Video Studio will) and then use an app like CloneDVD2 to compress file set into a 4.7GB file set. Not sure how the quality will be, but apps like CloneDVD are designed to create decent compressed DVD's from dual layer source disks, and the results with...er...commercial DVD's has been excellent....
-Jim
http://jimstips.com/
My mom always said, "Jim, you're 1 in a million." Given the current population, there are 7000 of me. God help us all!
assuming you do have an apple, final cut & dvd studio- it's pretty straight forward. final cut will import directly, compressor will encode and dvd studio will author the dvd. i had no idea what i was doing and was able to do it in a day.
do as few encoding/decodings as possible and burn the disk slow. make sure your (total) bit rate is below the dvd spec for stand-alone players. at least that's what i figured out...
The Doom9 site is simply one of the best sites you could go to for anything video-encoding related. Read through some of their DVD encoding guides, they'll walk you through how to get decent encodes and point you to the software you'll need.
This is easy....you need to just wait a little while, affordable bluray & hd-dvd burners that can handle your 19GB movie are surely just weeks away!
Simple Answer Super at http://www.erightsoft.com/SUPER.html It supports all the format and uses open source software and it's free browse around
Simple, free, one-click solution: DivxtoDVD. Fast and easy, quite good results.
If you want to get into it more, you need Avisynth (to load the AVI, scale it, apply filters); a video encoder (I like HCenc), an audio encoder (like BeSweet), an authoring app (like GUifor DVDAuthor, finally a burning app (use Nero or whatever came with your burner).
These are all free Windows software, you can do it all in Linux, but it's not so user-friendly. Most Mac users tend to use commercial software.
HCenc is free and pretty good, if not extremely fast (if used in "best" mode, which I always do).
http://www.erightsoft.net/Superdc.html/ Free open source software all the format and setting you can ask for have a look
The actual MPEG-2 encoder isn't part of iMovie, it's part of iDVD.
iMovie just outputs an edited DV file and chapter information; the heavy lifting is done in iDVD.
I haven't really followed the progress of iDVD very closely over the past few years. Once upon a time, the compressor that it used was pretty miserable: it was a CBR thing at a very high bitrate, which was great if you just wanted to put 60 minutes of DV footage onto a disc, but useless for anything else. If they've improved that at all, it might be an option.
The only Apple product that really fits the bill here is Compressor, which is part of Final Cut Studio. It's their "professional grade" MPEG encoder; has lots of options, including VBR, multipass, distributed encoding, etc. I can't really compare it to any other very high end tools, but I've been told its output is very good. It gives you enough options that you can tweak the output to your liking, and balance output size against quality for whatever suits your project.
It's really designed to work as part of a FC-based workflow, in the same way that iDVD is made to accept stuff from iMovie, but I'm pretty sure that if you just had a DV file, you could use it to do the compression. Ultimately, what Apple wants you to do is use FCP for editing, then Compressor for encoding, and then DVD Studio Pro to build the disc master image. Coming in halfway through the workflow may not be the easiest thing in the world, but it shouldn't be impossible.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
A lot of the comments here suggest that you buy a several thousand dollar encoder to fix this problem... not really the best solution. In reality, TMPGEnc (already mentioned) has long been on par with CCE quality-wise. Furthermore, it's free.
However, the problem probably is less the encoder than the source. DV is usually incredibly noisy, and thus very very difficult to encode. This can be helped a lot by good filtering. TMPGEnc includes some filtering options that may work for you, but if you're looking for the real deal (and have a lot more time to blow), head on over to doom9.org. Back when I was doing this sort of thing, the Convolution3D AVISynth filter was the best way to increase compressibility, but that was two-three years ago, so things may have changed. That may be a good starting-point, though.
http://www.free-codecs.com/download/ratDVD.htm
http://mediacoder.sourceforge.net/
PCM is uncompressed audio, half your file size is probably the audio. Demultiplex the audio to a separate (.wav) file, encode it to even the highest quality AC3 or MP2 at 48000 sample rate; you'll save several gigs. PCM audio is used to make the AVI easier to edit and keep in synch, but you don't need that for playback.
There is a fixed limit on the max bit rate, some older DVD players don't have the horsepower to decode and play high bitrate files. You can lay down high bitrate files just fine, but the player might not be able to play them. This is especially problematic for PCM files, you really should encode them as AC3, which are far lower bitrates but are essentially the same quality. There is a fixed limit on the total (audio + video) bitrate in the DVD spec, don't exceed it or you end up with stuttering files just as you described.
If you're a Mac user, the iLife suite includes two tools that greatly simplify just such tasks, iMovie HD and iDVD. These tools follow the Apple mantra of ease of use, straightforward, and simple - while codec and compression settings are there, they are unnecessary for most things. These tools are relatively cheap, especially compared to Adobe Premiere, they don't have the features either. Seriously nonlinear editing comparable to Premiere is available on Mac OS in Final Cut, but the use case you present doesn't really call for most of Premiere's capabilities.
I've been impressed by these products, and use them for 95% of my non-professional video work - family movies, open source project presentations, hobby art films, etc. The only other product I added to keep me out of the $1,300USD price tag attached to Final Cut is a license for QuickTime Pro. $30USD for QTPro, plus the $80USD for iLife - $110USD is reasonable.
Mind you, these are Mac OS-only tools. If you don't own a Mac, I'd hope that there are PC equivalents. That said, if you do this sort of DVD compliation on a regular basis, buying a Mac might be worthwhile. If you don't feel you need a Mac for anything else, or the cost seems high, even the entry-level Mac Mini will do what you need, in this case.
I'm not trying to be a Mac bigot here, I don't own Apple stock, there's no commission in it for me. That said, there's a reason Apple is the darling of media developers. Their years of experience in Hollywood and professional multimedia have resulted in the some really mature, usable, and cheap prosumer tools for home use. Enjoy!
"Adventure? Excitement? A Jedi craves not these things."
I have to ask - did you buy Premiere Pro, or did you pirate it?
.m2v and .wav files into Encore. Create a fancy menu, whatever you want. Encore will convert your WAV to AC3 automagically when you create your DVD.
Because Premiere Pro 2.0 at least (and probably other versions too) exports direct to DVD if you want:
File - Export - To DVD
Pick your options and burn.
If you have Encore you can instead export from Premiere Pro using Adobe Media Encoder. Choose MPEG2-DVD format, pick your options again (VBR 2-Pass is best, max bitrate 7MB), export demuxed and then put the resulting
Seriously - read the program's own help files!!! Sheesh...
Visceral Psyche Films
I've been recording F1 Grand Prix (and movies etc) digitally through a Canon DVD camcorder that has an analog to digital pass through mode. This gets captured on a Sony Vaio laptop (with firewire in) using the free WinDV.exe. I then edit as required using Adobe Premiere, then encode the resulting DV avi file to MPEG-2 using TMPGEnc. I usually encode using 2 pass VBR, and with this method I can get a quality result. The maximum video length for decent quality is around 2 hours for a 4.7Gb DVD. You can get more with a lower bitrate, but I find 2 hours is the effective limit (for me at least). Your 90 min video should look great using this method and with a higher bitrate. TMPGEnc does cost for the MPEG-2 codec. (or not if you look around) :)
Try it.. you'll like it, and I've never had a crash from encoding using TMPGEnc. With 6-10 hours required to encode a 2 hour video, thats important.
this is not a flawless plan.. this is inspiration
Since you're getting dropped frames, maybe your PC isn't up to the job. A camcorder can spit out a LARGE amount of data.
Have you considered a standalone, entertainment-center-type DVD recorder? I think you can get one for pretty cheap with firewire in. So you would hook your firewire output to the DVD recorder (to avoid digital -> analog -> digital conversion losses), and just record to a blank disk.
A brief look online found the Panasonic DMR-ES15S for about $150. There are probably cheaper, and I've never used this model before so I don't know if it's any good.
You'll definately want to use MPEG2 Variable Bitrate encoding. That's a two-pass encode, it takes its time, but the result is worth it. I managed to get more than two hours of lecture recordings on one 4.7 GB DVD, with perfectly fine quality. Your 1½ hour should fit well. Since you have 1/3 less playtime than I had, you could increase the average bitrate (or the audio bitrate) to maximize quality.
I used Ulead DVD authoring products - Movie Factory for simple stuff, DVD Workshop for complex. They both did a fine job of encoding, and would do so today as well. It's a couple years ago, and even better products may be on the market now, haven't followed it closely.
Good luck!
I'm in a Unix state of mind.
why did you render into avi, isnt the standard for dvds mpg?
90 minutes on a single-layer DVD should look excellent. You will use a bitrate of about 6 Mbps, which is plenty for high quality SD. But you must use a decent encoder.
Nero's, as well as those on most all-in-one DVD edit/encode/author software are crap. The one that comes with Premiere is actually very good, but I prefer CinemaCraft Encoder Basic available at Visible Light for a mere $58. (Understand that the full version retails for over $2500 and has been used on commercial DVDs for many years.) It's not only quite good, but it's very fast. And it will plug directly into Premiere so you don't have to save that 19 GB intermediate AVI (or go through the associated additional encode/decode cycle, which also degrades the quality).
After encoding, you must author your DVD. Adobe's Encore is good, but at $350, it's pretty expensive. I recommend DVD-Lab, the standard version of which is only $99.
Both of these are available for trial download, so you don't have to take my word for it.
Note that for audio, you can use MP2 for PAL destinations, even for commercial DVDs, and CCEB will do this for you. But for NTSC destinations, MP2 is not required to be supported by the players. You'll need to obtain a DolbyDigital (AC3) encoder, which is a different story (or you can use PCM, but this would force you to use a lower bitrate on the video, which would degrade the quality, so I don't recommend it).
Xesdeeni
TMPGEnc is cheap (free for 30 days) and easy and works well. Cinema Craft Encode works better for certain kinds of footage. Be sure to encode your audio to Dolby Digital AC3, rather than uncompressed PCM, to save yourself a lot of disc space which can be put to better use encoding your video. You can save the same amount of space encoding the audio with MPEG compression, but that form of audio compression is not officially part of the Region 1 DVD spec.
I was surprised that nobody else said "Go with Apple" so I guess I will. I've worked with DVD production on both macs and pcs and find the macs to do a better job. iDVD should fit the bill considering you haven't done the process before. However, DVD Studio Pro can be really easy if you use the templates and provides a great deal of extra power/detail if you need. I haven't tried most of the PC programs mentioned by other posters but I can't stress the Mac option enough if you're new to the process and have acces to a Mac.
harmonious design
There are 3 simple rules not to lose quality:
7 .html ). If the program allows it, select also "progressive scanning" option. Near all TVs,DVD players support it. It becomes dubbed as "480p"
1) Perform effects, fade in,fade out etc on non compressed source never overwriting it. E.g. use "edited.avi" as output file
2) Never upsample. E.g. don't convert to DivX, it is lossy, "final" format. Decide what media you will need and compress using regular TV specs, don't delete the source if you can. For example, if you want to output to NTSC/Progressive (which in case, camera is not HD), here is resolution specs. Anything lower loses quality, higher won't work.
648 x 486-->Standard NTSC ( http://www.strata.com/support/3dmanual/ch13/ch13_
3) Do not transcode. E.g. do not convert something to DivX (mpeg 4 variant) and re-convert it to Mpeg 2..
4) Always use "multi pass" encoding. Not only the result will be smaller, it will be better quality as the bandwidth is used wherever needed.
Your problem was, single layer DVD. As the output media lacks space , the program you used lowered quality to fit 4.7 gb media. You should use dual layer DVD or 2 DVDs (which seems like bad idea)
I am on Mac so I really forgot/don't watch Windows/Linux programs but there is one program I can blindly suggest: TGMpegEnc. I have even seen it used in purely professional production work on windows based studios. Don't let its "plain" look trick you. It is a very advanced solution which I heard "basic" version is free.
I have ran into this issue before.
Nero, while it works, is a HORRIBLE way to encode DVDs. There are many alternative solutions.
First, instead of exporting your project in Premiere as an AVI, try exporting it to DVD, or to an MPEG2 format. Adobe Encore is pretty user friendly for creating DVDs, with the menus and interaction and stuff, but it will also rerender your movie to fit your target media.
What I usually use is Canopus Procoder, and it has a Premiere plugin. In Premiere, export to Canopus, then choose DVD. Play with your settings some, I usually set my minimal bitrate to 3.5 meg a second, and my max to sex meg, with my target bitrate being 4.5 meg a second. Do a two pass VBR encode. Set your quality to Mastering. Expect this to take anywhere from 8 hours to 28 hours, depending on speed of processor, how many edits you have in Premiere, and other issues.
Now, use TMPEG DVD Author to write the vob files to DVD.
Yeah, this is not a freeware method, but in my experience, this gives you the highest quality picture available.
I use nero 7 (specifically NeroVision) to make dvds. The quality is good, but unless I did the following to disable the nero codecs the audio was out of sync with the video. Also, turning off the "smart audio transcoder" (something like that) is a good idea because a bug in the "auto" (default) video quality option means that it calculates quality to fit the video and audio to the disk assuming re-compressed audio, and then "smart transcoding" decides not to re-compress the audio and it goes over the size of the disk and fails to burn.
/u "C:\Program Files\Common Files\Ahead\DSFilter\NeAudio.ax /u "C:\Program Files\Common Files\Ahead\DSFilter\NeVideo.ax
To disable nero codecs:
Start > Run > regsvr32
Start > Run > regsvr32
Make sure you are exporting in a standard DVD resolution/format/framerate.
Some export utilities will allow you to export resolutions that are valid MPEG-2 but not compliant with the MPEG-2 subset used with DVDs. The end result is usually that PC-based players will play it fine, some standalones play it fine, some standalones will do weird things when playing it, and some standalones won't play it at all.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Artifacts like you describe occur when the DVD doesn't give proper hints at how to "fill in the blanks" and convert 60 fields per second into 60 frames per second. If the DVD player uses the wrong algorithm, the video will look pixelated. The three basic algorithms are as follows:
If you instruct the DVD player to use Inverse Telecine, Film, Movie, Weave, Progressive, ect, on an interlaced source, like a camcorder, you will get artifacts.
No, I will not work for your startup