Getting 120min quality video on 1 DVD-R

Hope that someone can help me on this.. I have recently purchased the Pinnacle Studio AV so that I could archieve some of my Laser Disc's that are out of production,(as well as some VHS/CAM tapes). I don't know if they will ever be put on DVD, and this is my reason for transfereing certain labels, such as "I love You To Death" and some others. Now when I use the software in the PSAV package, which is great for capturing, editing, but when it comes to Making the movie, like the re-encoding and building all the necc. files/folders, it takes about 18-20 hours to render a 2 hour movie. And whats even more fustrating, I can't make it at it's highest quality and put it all on 1 DVD-R, to maintain maximum quality it will take 2 DVD-R's to cover a simple 120min film. Now assuming that there are other tools to use, and after all capturing is done, and editing,(making the necc. chapters, and menu's) are there alternatives, and perhaps any of the FAQ's on this site I could use, and if so could you recommend which ones I should use and in their perspect order. Many Mahalo's for anyones help in this matter.

Drafty, Thanks very much for your reply! I've been reading the threads on this site now since March, when I got my DVD-R/RW burner. Since I am new to all this, I haven't rushed into it, and yet have dabbled around following this guide and that to try to get hands on learning. I've even set Doom9.org as my home page since I spend a great deal of time reading here, doing searchs and the like. It was just recently that I decided to try and back up some of my LD, and try to get some old TV shows that I have recoreded to disc. My first attempt was Raiders of the Lost Ark, That didn't turn out too bad, but the sound should have been lowered during capture, subsquently I've got some distorted areas of that attempt. Then I transfered my sisters wedding tape, and for a 20 year old tape it ain't the greatest but at least it is now saved and should prevent any further degradation to the quality. Really got into learnng about transitions doing that and had some real good fun in the process. Yesterday I was in the process of transfering "I Love You To Death" from LD, and this is when I posted the above inquiry. I've since went ahead with business as usual while awaiting for answers, and my finall out come wasn't all that bad. Now I did get all of the 97min of the movie to disk, the program Pinnacle Studio AV reported that I only achieved 68% quality with a bit rate of 5500 but it doesn't say if it is CBR or VBR. Since there are no two areas to set bit rate as you stated a High and Low, thus being VBR, I would assume that the single setting indicates CBR, and does not offer VBR settings. I've tried to use LSX, for encoding, and it reported the following message: "Could not find appropiate video CODEC. AVI file may be corrupted or use unsupported video compression format. Please select valid input AVI file." I will give TMPGEnc a go and follow your advice on that. Question 1? Do you make the chapters and menus before encoding or after? Sorry if I sound lame on this, but this is a big ball of wax to try to comprehend all at once. Question 2? I am using Studio 8 from Pinnacle to do my capturing, are there any other software/s out there that I could use the DV10+ capture card with? Or is it a propriatary thing? Also you need not worry about boring me, I don't mind legthly descriptions if you feel the need. Thanks again,

Yes thanks on the correction, the card is the DC10+. The Pinnacle encoder isn't bad, but sloooooooooooow as heck. But I do have a very limited experiance so when I say it isn't bad, some one else with plenty experiance may find it low grade... Thanks for your reply,

>Question 1? Do you make the chapters and menus before encoding or after? Sorry if I >sound lame on this, but this is a big ball of wax to try to comprehend all at once. Chapters are made after encoding process in the dvd authoring software itself. In my case DVD maestro >Question 2? I am using Studio 8 from Pinnacle to do my capturing, are there any other >software/s out there that I could use the DV10+ capture card with? Or is it a propriatary >thing? Now you have had a response to this before and it is kind of confusing me, someone said that the DV10+ is a MJPEG capture card but as afar as I am aware the way the video is encoded is down to the program you use for capturing. Although operations in software my be speeded up in hardware , perhaps this is the clue. However I am now out of my depth... I capture TV using my creative personal cinema but I have not yet tried to convert this to DVD. tmpgenc btw is not for capturing just for transcoding.

oh btw if your semi-serious about getting those old films converted. Why not buy a Panasonic DVD Recorder for the living room and record directly into the recorder. I believe the quality is really good the encoding time is real time!

Encoding from LD 

Coldfire, I have just started to archive from VHS and have found that the Hauppauge PVR 250 capture card is excellent for the Job. It has a hardware MPEG2 encoder on the board and encodes at whatever bitrate you set in the parameter. ( constant & variable bit rate can be set up to 12 Mbits/sec ) When the file is encoded I then use Sonic DVDit PE to make menus and Write the DVD. I hope this is of use to you. regards Darren

@fasttimes, I disagree that depends on what you class as optimum... you get speed and ease of use and quality, silent small tidy unit. So whats not optimum? The only drawback is cost , but you do get a digital recording device to use for other things other than TV capture. You can even pause live TV.. optimum...? BTW if your recording those old video's don't forget about macrovision... I have used Macromaster sync corrector its ok but macrovision can still be detected. At least on my creative personal cinema. Records from Video to Video OK though... strange. Regards, Drafty.

To get 2 hours of high-quality on a single DVD-R is going to be more complicated than you probably first assumed. First, you can calculate the overall bitrate (video+audio) by simply dividing 600 by the number of minutes. 600/120=5, so you are stuck with a bitrate of 5Mb/sec. Now, you need to think about audio. Raw PCM audio is about 1.5Mb/sec, leaving you with a video bitrate of just 3.5Mb/sec. To get some decent video quality with that extremely low bitrate means some serious encoding and prefiltering. If you can compress the audio into AC-3 (the official standard for NTSC and therefore Hawaii) or MP2, then you only need .2Mb/sec for audio, leaving 4.8Mb/sec for video, a much nicer number. In any event, you're probably talking about TMPGEnc (cheap and slow) or CCE (expensive and fast).

Richard, For MP2 audio, is there a standard bit rate? I've seen 384 kbps and 224 kbps used.