DVD Capacity

Purchased movie DVDs can contain over one and a half hours of a movie.
Why can't I put more than a half hour of video on a DVD from my Digital
8 camcorder?

"Murray" wrote in message
ps.com...
Purchased movie DVDs can contain over one and a half hours of a movie.
Why can't I put more than a half hour of video on a DVD from my Digital
8 camcorder?


Factory Pressed dvds are ~8gig capacity. Most DVD blanks are about half
that. Also, video can be stored in different formats, and different
resolutions and sample rates and compression ratios for each format.

For example, a 320X240 resolution video already takes up about 1/4th the
storage space of one that is 640X480 resolution. But then there is sampling
rate to account for. If you shoot the 320X240 video at 15fps (frames per
second), it will take up about half as much storage space as if you shot it
at a normal ~30fps. If you compress the video, it can take up even LESS
storage space, but there are literally hundreds of compression schemes.
Each one offers different video quality, and offers finished file sizes that
vary greatly.

If you want more than half an hour of video on a DVD that you shot using
your digital 8 camcorder, the solution might be as simple as choosing a
different recording mode on your DVD recorder. For example, I have a
standalone DVD recorder that defaults to "sp" recording level. At sp, it
can fit one hour of video into about 2.1GB of storage space. Or, about 2
hours of video on one average sized DVD blank. But if I change the quality
up to highest level, the recording capacity drops to 1 hour per dvd blank.
And if I turn down the quality on the DVD recorder to "LP", the capacity of
each DVD blank increases to about 4 hours. Oh, and the video quality at LP
is comparable to the average VHS video recorder (remember those?)

I suspect you will find that the video equipment you are using (camcorder,
DVD recorder) have settings that are optimized for highest quality video.
Try turning down your settings on the camcorder or the DVD recorder or both.
Then make a test recording, to see if you are still happy with the video
quality. You probably will be. One half hour of video in 4GB of space is
overkill. So I suspect you can tweak the video quality settings quite a bit
to store more video on a blank DVD, and still get acceptable results. Good
luck, -Dave

Dave wrote:


Factory Pressed dvds are ~8gig capacity. Most DVD blanks are about half
that.

Unless you buy dual layer blanks. Movie DVD's use dual layer.