It's too big? But it came off of a DVD!!!

jonnyg wrote on 7/15/2008, 2:39 AM
For some time I've transferred old home video to DVD via a DVD recorder connected to my TV. This has worked fine but there is little available in the way of editing. I bought Magix Movie Edit Pro 14 Plus and copied one of the DVD's into the program. I done a little editing (which made the movie shorter) then went to the "Burn" page and after 2.5 hours I finally got a message that my video won't fit on a DVD. How can that be? it came off of a DVD !!! The movie in question is only 1hr 48m (108 minutes) long and DVD is supposed to hold a little over two hours. Any help would be gratefully received. I would point out that I anm pretty computer literate but have little experience with movie editing.

Thanks - jonny g

Comments

ralftaro wrote on 7/15/2008, 4:04 AM
Hello Jonny,

The space your video will take up on the final DVD depends exclusively on the bitrate that you're encoding your movie at before burning. If your movie no longer fits onto a DVD of the same capacity, it probably just means that you're trying re-encode the material at a higher bitrate than it was originally recorded in on your DVD recorder. Of course, there's no point in doing so, as the quality will not get better by re-encoding at a higher bitrate. However, the program might currently be configured to do so anyway. All you would have to do in order to fit the movie onto one single DVD would be a reduction of the bitrate. You can do this in the MPEG-2 encoder settings, which you can access from the final burning dialog in the program. There's a slider to adjust the bitrate, which will also give you a estimation of how much material you can fit onto a DVD with the currently selected rate.

By the way, if we're talking about a single-layer DVD here, fitting more than two hours on it would require some quality compromises. A more typical value here is 90 minutes, which is still possible at a typical, higher bitrate of over 6000 kbps. Fitting 108 minutes on a single-layer disc already requires a considerable bitrate reduction. Quality will probably still be fine, as long as the quality of your source material was ok.

I hope this helps.