General Advise about DVD authoring

[TerraForce1]

Hi,

My purpose is to capture my homevideo and author it with DVD Maestro.

Could someone give me some general advice (I prefer details like settings and stuff.)

At the moment I capture from my analogue camera using virtualdub 1.5.4. with Divx Pro 5.03 codec as compression. My 40 minutes avi equals to a size of 400 mb. After encoding with DVD2sVCD (encoder = CCE 2.50 output = m-peg2) I end up with a file that contains 6 gigabyte of data.
Somehow the filesize speed goes up form 2.2 to 28. My frame speed drops to from 1.200 to 0.445. I really doubt the fact that a 40 minutes analogue capture turns out to be 6 gigs encoded video. Even films of 1,5 hours turn to be 1,6 gigs. how is this possible.

Could someone please help?

[oddyseus]

U have encoded at a very high constant bitrate. U should re-encode at a variable bitrate (vbr) at max 2300 min around 100 and average 1800. That should suffice for your encode.

[jdobbs]

If you want the best quality and you have plenty of space I'd recommend you use a lossless or low loss codec (like maybe HUFFYUV) for capturing rather than something like DivX. Then when you reencode into MPEG-2 for DVD you aren't doubling the chances of distortion...

[TerraForce1]

Hi,

I capture my avi using virtualdub v1.5.4. I use DivxPro 5.03 Portable Profile (set to 304 kbs). I have not tested the material on my TV. The max bitrate = 768. I don't know if it's acceptable. But for the 40 minutes of capture I end up with a 400 mb filesize. If I say that many divx movies take 700 mb for an 1,5 hour, so I guess I use a common standard. But I won't know before I tested the thing at my widescreen.

I want to thank oddyseus for his advice. @ jddobs Thx to you too, but I am not that power user. It's a bit struggling. At first encoding takes much longer. My 40 minute footage took 1,5 hour to encode. After that I ended up with 6 gigs of data. For people who really want to do this it's sure takes more time than with compressed data. I used your method with the little parts of my footage. Like 2 minutes or 6 minutes lenght. After encoding I endup with a filesize round 60 mb. Which is nice according to my situation.

But so far I have not tested the whole. But if I am done I will post it. I hope there won't be too much difference.

TerraForce1