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?"

Comments

Re:iMovie

[Jeff DeMaagd]

Apple makes it easy but their software is also aggravating in some respects. iMovie's titling system is extremely constricted, most titling themes don't allow you any control over placement. iDVD is the program you use to author a DVD from a video file, and its audio and video encoding is basically single-threaded, so despite having a dual processor system, that program won't be any faster than if you had a single processor system.

Re:Cinema Craft Encoder

[karnal]

I've used DVDShrink on my many... ahem.. movies, and I've NEVER seen it drop frames to get the compression to the level it needs to fit a disc to a DVD-R....

Not iMovie -- Compressor is what you want.

[Kadin2048]

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.