Help compressing video

I'm converting video from my Canon Video Cam
which is in the form of .m2ts into .mpg (layer 2)
through a video editing suite.

The videos are the Burren Starparty Talks and are
around an hour each.
They are taking over 8 hours to render and when they
are finished they are huge in size (1.2 Gb)

I wanted to create a DVD or CD disk so as to give to
our club members.

The disk would be 3.6 gb in size!?

Is there some other format that is less bulky.
I really don't want to go zipping files either,
may of our club members would not be computer savvy.

Also,
What is the average size of a DVD blank disk.
I may buy a seperate DVD burner anyway for home use.

Thanks.

Blank standard DVD = 4.7G
windows media wmv is usually much smaller, as is the flash format.
I've been working with MPG2 for making DVD's.
I use Adobe Premier which can render to many many formats and sizes. But it's not cheap.
If you really get stuck I'd be prepared to try and help out, but I'm up in Dublin.

All the best
Steve

Thanks Steve.
I'm using Sony's Movie Studio 9 Pro
and there is the world of formats / sizes / options
for converting and rendering.
I'll give WMA a go and see how that works out.
I wonder am I stretching it trying to fit
3 one hour talks onto a 700mb CDr?

Barberskum wrote:

I'll give WMA a go and see how that works out.

WM'V' Frank, not WMA - WMA is Microsoft's answer to MP3.



Seanie.

Frank,

It depends what your target audience is. If you want discs that will play in a domestic DVD player then probably the best bet is to encode them as VideoCD format. Picture quality is OK-ish, about the same as VHS tape and you get up to 80 mins per CD.

Or you could stick with mpg2 and burn them to a DVD. 3 hours on a disc will compromise quality, but if there's not much movement in the video it will be OK.

Once you've created your first disc and checked it out, use something like Roxio or Nero to save the disc as an iso image, that way you can make copies in 10 mins rather than having to re-render the whole thing every time.

If you only want the discs to play on computers then as others have said, wmv is as good as anything, or divx or mp4, all flavours of the same thing.

Good luck!

Paul.

Thanks for that.
I think I'll 10 min snippets up on Utube of 2 of the talks
and then if people want the DVD they can order through the SAC site.
I'll go with making a master DVD with Roxio or that and
then just burn as needed.