Now you want to make a movie, before starting studiyng details, just a bit of philosophy. First make sure Aspirator detected the movie on the DVD you want to encode (for exemple check the length) . Then you got 3 parameters that are tied together :
- The final movie size (700, 1400 megs ?) and the type of the movie.
- The number of pass for the video codecs.
- The type of audio AC3 or MP3, and eventually the Kbps for MP3.
There're no mathematics rules to set all these parameters, just some inidications.
- The length of the movie. If it's more than 2 hours, you should choose a 2 CD's movie, like 1400 megs.
- The type of the movie. If it's movie like "Any Given Sunday" always moving with 40 shots per minut, it'll need a lot of video data. So for that kind of movie, you should choose a 2 CD movie even if it's onley 1 hours 45 minutes. At the opposite if it's a 2 hours movie very static it could have a good quality on only 1 CD.
- The number of pass. What is that ? Video codecs have two methods for encoding. The first one is to set an average amount of data for each seconds of video, and that's it. The problem is that moments on the movie needs more to get a good quality, then it pixelized (big squares). On the other hand some moments do not need such amount datas to got a good quality. That's why they set the two passes method, wich consist in encoding a first time the movie just to retrieve it's video structure. Then on the second enconding you can spread the data to get the best average quality. Conclusion is : with 2 passes the quality is always best than with one pass. I would say with one CD movie always make 2 passes. Sometimes with 2 CDS, when you give a lot of space for video, the difference of quality between 1 and 2 passes is difficult to see.
- The audio type. If you choose AC3, the size of audio is too big for 1 CD. You must know that the size of one stream of AC3 for a 2 hours movies is 150 or 300 megs. For one CD you must choose MP3 audio type, and i think a good kbps (kilobit per second, amount of data for audio per second) is 96kbps with a vbr encoding (it takes less space thant a cbr encoding) . For 2 CD's you can choose AC3 if you only want one streams, for two streams, personally i would choose MP3.