Hi ya'll !
Last year I bought a SONY SR7 camescope, which allows me to record great quality videos. The AVCHD option is at the moment not used, due to the poor software solutions offered on the market so far.

So I use the "standard quality", which still in HQ mode allows me to record with a bitrate of 9Mbps ! (for which i certainly won't complain ^^).

I am recording the services of the church i'm in, and authoring DVD's that are available for the congregation, as well as a back up for a future internet streaming on our site.

I have a routine that is up and running so far.
I use ULEAD Videostudio 11 plus to edit the original videos, crop them, add some effects, ..., and then i export them with the MPEG OPTIMISATION tool. Then I use ConvertXtoDVD to convert the mpg file into a DVD compliant file, that i finally use in DVDLabPRO to create the DVD itself (menus, backgrounds, chapters, ...).

Now, besides the fact that this system is operational, I am now wondering if somehow I could improve all this. For instance, to avoid having too many DVD's to make, I put one month of church (4 sunday's services) on a double DVD's case (thus 2 services on each disc). So i configured each service's videofile to have a max size of 2.2 Go (makes 4.4 Go, giving 300 Mo left to DVlabPRO to store the menus and chapters data, which is more than enough).

The services last about 2 1/2 hours, which in a 9Mbps bitrates makes a file size of about 10Go. So i am well aware that to go from 10 to 2.2 Go of course brings a loss of quality.

SOOOOOOOO (finally ^^), I have ideas of improvements, but i don't know what would be the most efficient. For instance, is there another DVD converter than ConvertXtoDVD that would do a better job ( knowing I MUST be able to define a file size of 2200Mo in that program)? Should i try to work with another DVD creation program than DVDlab?

I tried to explore the Divx conversion way, since the Divx format has been created for compression purpose, i thought it would do a nicer job. But then first, the conversion time of a 10Go video takes forever (I have a pentium 4 3GHz Unicore, with 1Gb RAM, but maybe i used a bad program), then DVDlab does not recognize the divx format.

I downloaded the trial version of ULEAD moviefactory, will see if It gives interestig results.

Sorry for all the chat, wanted to give practical infos to help.