What length video should fit on a standard DVD-R?

[Nick T.]

Apologize in advance if this is a silly question, but I'm finding it surprising how little video I can burn to a DVD using Toast 9. I am using TiVo Transfer to move shows/movies to the mac and then (almost always) import them to iTunes to watch on my iPhone. That seems to work pretty well.

 

I decided to try burning a one-hour show recorded in 720p HD to a standard DVD-R and it appears that's about the maximum I can fit on a DVD. One hour? Am I doing something wrong? Also, will Toast automatically "downgrade" the video quality since I'm using a standard DVD or does it retain the resolution?

 

Thanks for the help!

 

[tsantee]

All video DVDs are standard definition so Toast must lower the resolution to meet the video DVD spec. It will anamorphically create a 16:9 aspect ratio during this process. Typically Toast can fit up to three hours of video to a single-layer DVD but the quality starts to noticeably decline after a little more than two hours to a disc.

 

One thing you might choose is to about three hours of video in the Toast project and choose Save as Disc Image. If asked tell Toast to make a dual-layer disc image file. When that is done select the disc image file using the Disc Image setting in the Toast Copy window and let Toast's fit-to-DVD process put all the content on a single-layer disc. This can have better quality than trying to fit all the content to a single layer disc in the first place.

[Nick T.]

I will give that a try. Thanks!

[jono]

All video DVDs are standard definition so Toast must lower the resolution to meet the video DVD spec. It will anamorphically create a 16:9 aspect ratio during this process. Typically Toast can fit up to three hours of video to a single-layer DVD but the quality starts to noticeably decline after a little more than two hours to a disc.

 

One thing you might choose is to about three hours of video in the Toast project and choose Save as Disc Image. If asked tell Toast to make a dual-layer disc image file. When that is done select the disc image file using the Disc Image setting in the Toast Copy window and let Toast's fit-to-DVD process put all the content on a single-layer disc. This can have better quality than trying to fit all the content to a single layer disc in the first place.

 

 

This solution works - whereas before I was told the information was too great for a 4.7 GB disk, now it encodes. But... how long should it take to write a 2 hour movie to a disk? The system seems very slow (running on an iMac with Snow Leopard).

[tsantee]

This solution works - whereas before I was told the information was too great for a 4.7 GB disk, now it encodes. But... how long should it take to write a 2 hour movie to a disk? The system seems very slow (running on an iMac with Snow Leopard).

The only thing that should be slow is the encoding of the HD video to standard definition. That takes a long time.