Hi Terry.

Of course it won't, although I understand where your concerns come from - blame marketing speak for this!.

It's basically nonsense - Hollywood have been outputting films on DVD running well past the 1 hour mark for over a decade now.

What determines the final image quality on any DVD has much, much more going on than simple running time.

Initially, you should start with the highest quality assets available to you. A lot of the time, this will be SD Video - Standard Definition Video - at 720x480 pixels if in NTSC regions, or 720x576 in PAL regions. If it is higher than this, it is a form of High(er) Definition video. That would introduce our first variable, as high definition source material needs to be correctly scaled or reduced in resolution to SD.

Then it needs to be transcoded into a DVD compliant compressed data format called MPEG-2, standing for the Motion Picture Experts Group, although some wags would claim it really stads for "moving pictures by educated guesswork". There are many encoders out there, and some are frankly better than others at all settings, whilst others work well in some cases but not in others. It's a bit of a minefield. Encore's MainConcept encoder is pretty good.

Quality here depends on the available bitrate, which depends on running time divided by available disc space, with added complexity caused by quality of source, quality of encoder & rapidity of motion in the source.

Basically, the more action in the film (or explosions, fires - anything difficult to encode because of fast motion etc) the more bits that section will need so another trick is using VBR or CBR - Variable bitrate will use fewer bits when it can in order to use more when it has to. VBR will always vary the bitrate to maintain quality. CBR uses the same number of bits, regardless of content, and will only ever vary the quality or (in best case scenario) waste disc space.

If using Dolby Digital Audio, which is 0.192kbps for stereo, this leaves you with up to 9,500kbps for film.

A DVD9 has 65,000 avalable MegaBits for use (after subtracting an overhead) so a 3 hour film would run for 10,800 seconds.

Audio MegaBits used we cancalculate as it is a fixed bitrate, so 0.192 x 10,800 = 2073.6MegaBits.

65,000 - 2073.6 = 62926.4 MegaBits remaining

This gives you a video bitrate of 62926.4/10800 = 5.83Mbps, or 5,830kbps for your video bitrate. That's almost 6Mbps, and a lot of hollywood come in at less than this. a 2-pass VBR would be your best fit, with the minimum at 2,000, the maximum at 6,000 and the target at 5,000 (Some encoders cheat here and set the maximum internaly to the spec limits - I do not recommend trying this in settings though).

A well-encoded film at an average bitrate of 5,000 kbps is not going to look terrible by any stretch although a lot does depend on those variables.

Hope this helps

Hi Terry.

The encoders used by the "industry" such as is left of it are generally either CinemaCraft or else CineVision.

CinemaCraft's full version of CCE-SP3 is expensive but not brutally so at around £1,000 before haggling (these suppliers will nearly always haggle too - never accept retail in these days as we have a buyers market right now) - but the even better news is that there is a stripped-back version that will get you probably 95% of the way that the full one will get you and it is a fraction of the price at around $58. Seriously. Okay, it is not as good as the big brother version but it gets you seriously close. Well, well worth getting the trial version at least.  There is also a great "getting started" tutorial for it over on Doom 9's forums. I've been using CCE-SP3 for a couple of years now & never once regretted plonking the cash down as it really does give superior encodings to most of the rest.

CineVision is simply brutally dear, with 4 variants on offer - although it is designed for BluRay it will do SD as well. There are 4 versions from expensive all the way up to needing a remortgage and support is a whopping £1,750 per annum. Okay, it does do all 3 stream types but that's not so much - nobody uses MPEG-2 in BD production as the quality to file size ratio is twice as large for no better quality compared to AVC/H264 - which rather neatly brings me to the best AVC/H264 encoder out there - x264 Pro. This is not the right thread so I will talk more about that later.

I'm drifting dangerously close to off-topic here right now.....the point was simply that you can get the highest quality outputs from a good source file.

The trick to it is (I believe) to render out from Premiere first and then encode that to MPEG-2 afterwards. Any scalng (remember AVCHD is already a lossy form so be careful with it) should be done at this point, and definitely not at the same time as the actual MPEG-2 encoding - although it must be said that CCE-SP3 does a great job of scaling too.

Encore tends to work best when fed with pre-cooked, DVD compliant assets in the first place - so I would also avoid using Dynamic Linking, but that is just me & my workflow. Encore's built-in encoder is a MainConcept engine, which is the same engine as Sonic's CineVision (or should I say "Rovi TotalCode" these days, perhaps - they too have a Premiere Plugin these days)