Sounds like you are only interested in SD quality, so:

~60 min DVD HQ on a 4.7GB disc
~120 min DVD HQ on a 8.5GB disc
~760 min SD (DVD HQ type quality) on a 25GB BD disc (if you have a Blu-ray burner and player)
~1520 min SD (DVD HQ type quality) on 50GB BD disc (if you have a Blu-ray burner and player)

One can fit more time, however, that comes at reduced quality, be it framesize or bitrate.

Jeff

Hi JL_JL,

I'm looking for an intelligent way to distribute, let's say, 30 - 40 gigs of video over x number of standard DVDs, in sequence, without having to manually split every disc out one at a time.

"60 minutes" is meaningless until the software does it's work with bit rates, etc.

Sometimes I'll use SD quality, sometimes full HD. I don't know why you assumed the former

Hi Jeffrey22 -

As soon as I see "DVD" I would assume "SD" too.

So - you're not referring to DVDs to be played in a DVD player? You mean data DVDs? If so, I'd be using a more efficiebt form of storage/distribution. That would mean you wouldn't need to split videos.

As Jeff stated, if you're burning DVDs for playback in a player using DVD HQ will give you about 60 minutes @ ~8Mbps (SD).

Maybe I'm misunderstanding exactly what it is you're trying to do.

Cheers - Tony
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I do NOT mean data DVDs. That would be easy to do with WinRAR or Nero.

I mean videos in whatever format a job requires.

As in the example above, if I end up transferring the following to digital video:

7,000 feet of 8mm home movies from film

3 VHS tapes

15 Hi8 tapes

Now I have a bunch of video data that I need to put on DVDs to watch on TV.

The videos are all different lengths.

How I do it now is very clumsy and inefficient: I estimate the length of the initial video data and drop a few videos into a timeline (Premiere or PD). I use the disk burning features to see how much will fit on a DVD at a given bitrate and frame size, then trim the video or add more, accordingly. If I need to trim, I save that off to add at the beginning of the next DVD.

I then do this over and over and over to end up with however many DVDs I need to hold all the movie data I have. DVDs that are playable in standard DVD players.

There must be a better way to put a lot of movies on the fewest DVDs possible.

Estimating and trimming excess manually seems to be something a computer could do really well.

They do it for data disks now. Why not DVD movies?

Say I have 60 gigs contained in 100 movie clips, and I exported those to play at 1920x1080/60i. I want to burn those to playable DVDs.

I saw another post about creating a single massive project in PD, then splitting out the first DVD, marking the location, creating a new project, splitting out the second DVD, marking the start and end locations, then creating a 3rd project, splitting out the third DVD, and so on.

This seems incredibly time consuming and error prone.

Quote:
I'm looking for an intelligent way to distribute, let's say, 30 - 40 gigs of video over x number of standard DVDs, in sequence, without having to manually split every disc out one at a time.

"60 minutes" is meaningless until the software does it's work with bit rates, etc.

Sometimes I'll use SD quality, sometimes full HD. I don't know why you assumed the former

Meaningless, thank you, but it is correct.

Say that the ~35GB you reference was 1920x1080 footage at 50mbps bitrate, that would be ~90min of source footage. To put this on a DVD so one can playback in a standard DVD player it would need to be downsampled to SD 720x480 (NTSC regions), 8mbps bitrate. PD would do that in the "Create Disc" phase as your target was DVD. That ~35GB source footage would simply fit on one DVD 8.5GB disc, as I had said, ~120 minutes will fit.

Conversely, say the ~35GB you reference was all MPEG2 720x480 8mbps source footage you wanted to put on DVD. Yes ~35GB of this native DVD format is about 600min worth of video and would take ~5 8.5GB DVDs or ~10 4.7GB DVDs.

You can't put SD quality and full HD quality on a standard DVD with playback expected on a standalone DVD player unless all source footage is resampled to DVD compliant format during the disc creation phase, hence why ~60min is the standard for a 4.7GB DVD.

Since your intent is to have a series of discs that support playback on a standalone DVD player then you have really two options.
1) create ~60min video chunks and put on a 4.7GB DVD
2) create ~120min video chunks and put on a 8.5GB DVD

Other options to put more time on a DVD can be done but come at the risk of quailty.

PD has no disc spanning.

Good luck

Jeff