Authoring 16 short films on one DL

Hi all,

This is a bit confusing, any help will be appreciated.

I’m authoring compilation of 16 short films (around 4 hours of material) on PAL DVD. This is what I plan to do, somebody please tell me is this makes any sense?

Some of the films are older with 4:3 ratio, some newer with 16:9, some letterboxed into 4:3, some anamorphic.
I got some films already as DVD PAL, some as mpeg2 PAL (converted from a DVD I guess), few as Apple ProRes PAL and one as H264 1920x1080 29.97 fps.

I know, it’s a mess…

I’ve planned to make 2 single layer 16:9 DVDs (4:3 films will be pillarboxed), but my client wants me to try to fit it to 1 DL DVD.

These is my plan:

1. since I have 16 files, I plan to make 2 menus with 8 buttons each and let DVD SP take care of encoding, cause I really don’t know how to do it differently and count how much space each film will need.

2. demux films on DVDs and mpeg2 with MPEG Streamclip

3. ProRes files goes directly to DVD SP

4. 29.97 fps film convert to PAL in Compressor, just not sure should I make ProRes file or .m2v

5. encode as upper field and pray to god I don’t have problems with fields…

One more problem… I never made DL DVD before.

I’ve made a test with one film (30 min long AppleProRes PAL), created 8 track of it with 8 buttons so I get 4 hours of material, left Encoding as default (One Pass VBR, 4.0-7.0 Mbps) and DVD SP counted I’ll need 10.1 GB of space. I build it to HDD and ended up with 9.27 GB file, which is far more then fits to DL

Which leads me to 2 more questions:

I don’t have DL burner on this computer right now. I’ll switch to another one on Monday, so when I burn directly from DVD SP will DVD SP fit content to DL? If not, how can I fit it manually?

I know I need to set Break point. Since I have 16 films, can I set Break point at beginning of film no.9 or at Menu2?

Thank you in advance

Seth