Help needed making a DVD small enough to upload...

[PaulMoore]

I have to get a showreel on DVD to someone in another country at short notice... my brother lives there and can mail it, but I need to somehow send him a file he can burn with iDVD (he doesn't have DVD Studio Pro).

It only needs to be 10 mins but it needs to be pretty good quality. I can upload something to him via FTP but ideally something less than 1GB (ie not a dmg of the entire DVD).

What file format would be best for a movie file that he could then burn with iDVD? I need the best quality for 10 minutes of footage, but ideally it would be less than 1GB... and not need to much time reencoding at the other end when he burns it...

Thanks for any advice...

 

[Consultant]

If it's 10 minutes even at no compression it should be under 1gb for standard definition.

If you got HD content, you can compress it to mp4 and then he can make it dvd burnable with visualhub

 

[PaulMoore]

I thought iDVD just because that would be the simplest way to add a menu... would mp4 retain the quality best even if used in iDVD?

And yes, it is SD content.

 

[mtfield]

MPEG2 is the DVD standard

 

[KeithPratt]

Would a compressed dmg do the trick? I have basically no knowledge of how it would work out, but if the DVD you have has lots of empty space, compression may be able to squeeze it down substantially. Or maybe it won't — I don't know.

Then again, do you need to go from NTSC to PAL or vice versa? If so you'd be best ripping the DVD, doing the standards-conversion, then compressing the video file to send. DV would probably be best, but it'd be close to 2GB for 10 mins.

 

[PaulMoore]

Wil iDVD work with MPEG2? I know DVD Studio Pro takes separate video and audio files for the same piece of footage... how would that work in iDVD?

Thanks for all the answers!

 

[Voodoophone]

A disk image of a 10 minute film, created in DVD Studio Pro should easily be less than 1Gig.
Build and format to a .img file and upload that. He can then mount in disk utility and job's a good'un. No loss in quality.

 

[PaulMoore]

A disk image of a 10 minute film, created in DVD Studio Pro should easily be less than 1Gig.
Build and format to a .img file and upload that. He can then mount in disk utility and job's a good'un. No loss in quality.

Thanks- I actually inadvertently discovered that iDVD works the same way- 10 mins= approx 550MB.

 

[Voodoophone]

Thanks- I actually inadvertently discovered that iDVD works the same way- 10 mins= approx 550MB.

Nice one. Glad you got sorted.