How Many Hours to a DVD?

[coriscapnskip]

How many hours of movie material are possible to fit on a DVD, and is there an amount recommended not to exceed even if it fits? I have many hours of material I want to edit into a DVD set and would like to estimate how many DVDs it will take to complete the set. Thanks and appreciation for any help and advice.

[tsantee]

In some ways it depends on what your requirements are for picture quality. I like to keep it less than 2-1/2 hours per disc. I think Toast can fit about 3-1/2 hours to a disc when it does the encoding but you should look at one of those before deciding if the picture is acceptable to you. The best quality is 1 hour per disc.

[coriscapnskip]

Thanks for the answer and here is a very quick basic rundown of what I was told elsewhere.

 

Went to Best Buy trying to buy blank DVD -Rs and was told "+R is the new standard." Asked about this on an online forum and was told the Best Buy Boys were full of it.

 

I'm now ordering disks online, but was told double, or as some insist on calling them, dual layer disks are expensive and hard to find, so presumably what I'll be buying is single layer -R.

 

Was told to stick as close to two hours per DVD as possible. Some people said 70-75 minutes for best quality, but with this amount of material I'd never get through. I am grouping the material by subject so won't panic if some disks end up a little under two hours and some a little over. Was also told iDVD won't allow for anything over two hours so it looks as if I won't be using that. Thanks for the advice.