NTSC R1 DVD of a TV series - getting it onto 1 DVD

[jeffnoone]

Have the Region1 NTSC DVD of Fawlty Towers
Fawlty Towers was originally made by BBC, and presumably was originally in PAL format - and was a regular TV show.

Subsequently released with 4 30-minute episodes per DVD with extras, with both PAL and NTSC releases
Now trying to fit the Region1 DVD conversion/version onto 1 DVD-R

DVD2AVI reports ths as 4:3 NTSC 29.97 interlaced - fullscreen, no black bars (as does Bitrate Viewer)

I initially thought I should do a "inverse telecine" on this, to reduce the fps to 24.97. However I ran the DVD2AVI project thru TMPEnc, and could not find any consistent flicker pattern (as per Doom's guide) - this made me think that the video had never been in 23.97 format, but existed as 29.97 interlaced only. As it was a converted TV show, this made some sense to me.

So in the end I did the following:
-set up a DVD2AVI project without ticking "Forced Film"
-used VFAPIConv
-ran it thru CCE 2.62 using 4:3 and by not ticking "Progressive"
I took the Doom9 1-pass VBR with Q=60 approach, min BR=0, max BR=9400

the problem is that a the resultant CCE file is huge - 6.6GB !!

I start with 3 hrs of video in the original VOB's - about 7 GB's- and ends up with 3 hrs of CCE video 6.6GB at over 5Mbit/sec bitrate. Superb quality but TOO BIG. In this situation, I would like to keep some of the extras - although one option would be to discard the extras, I would then need to only encode 2 hrs of video, which looks like it will come in around 4.4GB without the audio. With the Audio and with just 2 hrs of video, DVDMaestro reports this as 5.2 GB - too big again

CCE Settings that would usually cut video size by over 50% have done virtually nothing here!

Could someone help me on this?

Some options I am considering are:
-Forcing a "Force Film" in CCE and hoping quality stays good without interlacing problems - this will result in a smaller file because of lower FPS
-Using half D1
-Can I use TMPEnc to do good quality IVTC or good quality de-interlacing, and somehow end up with lower filesize

Any advice on this

[mrpeg]

Why not edit the cce project after the first pass and pick multipass vbr as per the robshot method in the doom 9 guide http://www.doom9.org/mpg/cce-advanced.htm where you can choose a vbr for the second pass that will ensure your total dvd size is under 4.5 gigs (or whatever you pick). The quality should still be fine even with a lower vbr average.

[jeffnoone]

Will try the multipass option, and eyeball the result
What you describe is what I usually do.

One reason I didn't proceed immed to that was that I have generally found that the filesize from a 1pass VBR Q=60 is very similar to the file size obtained if you use the multipass Robshot method setting the Q Factor=9

I foresaw that I would have to compromise for a lower than recomeended multipass bitrate (at least as judged by trying to keep Q Factor <9)