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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?"
Don't mess with the frame rate. It won't get you anything, because an NTSC DVD will always be 29.97 Frames per second. As for your encoding troubles, somebody already mentioned TMPEGEnc, and ffmpeg. I like both of them. TMPEGEnc has a nice GUI, and runs on windows. ffmpeg has a nice command line interface, and runs on most anything, but is probably most pleasant on some sort of *NIX.
Basically, the problem you are running into is a mediocre encoder. You want an encoder that does a more thorough motion estimation search. Combined with a few other bells and whistles, it will allow very nice quality at a reasonable bit rate. It will also take quite a while to encode. On my Athlon64, at highest settings, I generally plan on leaving an encode running at least over night. A good rule of thumb is that if your encode is any faster than 2X the length of the clip, you probably forgot to turn on enough quality options. (Of course, some encoders are just slow with no benefit -- it's just a vague rule of thumb...)
Now, why are you using a 1.5 Mbit audio rate? That's probably much, much, much higher than you need. Compressing the audio more efficiently will free up more bitrate for video, where you seem to need it. Now, using rough numbers, with 90 minutes on a single layer DVD, you have something like 6 megabits per second to work with. This should be plenty. Hell, it should be plenty even with the big audio.
Now, please go do some research. There is a ton of information available on the Internet, and we shouldn't have to read it for you. Making a DVD is not a mysterious black art. Getting the relevant information doesn't require any secret handshakes or anything. It sounds like you aren't doing anything the least bit unusual.
By the way, what is the project?
CCE is the standard? that's a $2,000 program... maybe in YOUR world of legal archiving using illegal software... not to mention the interface is more the kind video compressionists understand (or hardened /.ers)
TMPGEnc has a slightly less geeky interface. 2.5 is powerful and has a 15 or 30 day trial... 3.0 Xpress has a very user friendly interface (but can't do HD).
i hear HC is good, but a knowledge in AVISynth may be required... (and the interface is CCE-like, too).
there's also all sorts of other encoders like MainConcept, Procoder, but i'm happy with TMPGEnc and *cough* CCE