converting my film to dvd

[austringer1]

Hi everyone,
My knowledge of dvd is virtually nothing, so bear with me if I ask any dumb questions.
A friend and I have just finnished making a 60 minute film. We are sending it away very shortly to have it transferred onto tapes & DVD. If we send the transfer company our film on miniDV tape, they will transfer it straight onto VHS. However, to transfer onto DVD, they require a fee for the initial conversion which is quite expensive. There is no fee if we send them a master copy already on DVD.
They require this master copy on DVD5...
Our master copy is on MiniDV, it is shot at 25fps and has a resolution of 720x576. This works out at approx 3.6Mb per second.
We would like our DVD to match the following criteria....

1. a picture quality equal to our miniDV tape.
2. Be Region Free
3. Copy protected, so that you can't plug a dvd player into a VCR and copy.

Using our video editing software, we can convert to most video formats. I have experimented with VCD & SVCD so I know a little about Mpeg1, but have no idea at all about DVD. What codec/format is used for DVD? At present I don't have a DVD burner either, but when I know what I have to do I will probably buy one as this will still be a lot cheaper than the fee asked by the bulk transfer company.
Any help here will be greatly appreciated.

Regards,
Andy.

[geobon]

The easiest way to do this is hook it up to a standalone DVD recorder, As for dvds they use MPEG2.

[austringer1]

Would a standard DVD Recorder give the maximum quality available? and would it be copy protected?
The reason I ask about the quality and mentioned resolution in my first post is that 1 hour of mini DV tape quality works out at approx 12-13Gb per hour, This confused me with the request of the film to be on DVD5, which I have found out is 4.7Gb I think. This would mean compressing the footage quite a lot to fit it on, Why do this when there are larger size DVDRs available?
My apologies if I am missing the obvious here, but I am new to the DVD scene, and unfortunately I have placed myself on a rather steep learning curve.......ideally, I need to get the said film to the copy place before 20th April.
Would it be like a cost thing? EG:if we fit it onto a 4.7Gig disc, this is cheaper to reproduce than an 18gig one? or does it have to be compressed to a certain size to be DVD compliant?
I know there are parameters for VCD to make them compliant, but I also know they are flexible. I burn my VCD's with a resolution of 720x576 and a lower bitrate rather than at the VCD compliant sizes with a bitrate of 1600, I get a much higher quality picture this way.

Regards,
Andy.

[geobon]

Well how long does the film play for? If its 2 hours or under no compression will be needed, as for dvd5 im afraid at this moment they are the largest dvdrs available, most standalone dvd recorders will record for upto 8 hours although i wouldn't recommend going over 4 hours, As for protection well if you ask me its a waste of time and money as any dvd can be recorded, simple programmes like DVDdecryper removes protection and most standalones nowadays are either macrovision free or there is a hack for them and if there was any better protection then im sure major film companies would be using it.

[aaronjon]

basically what you have got is a good quality 60 min. avi file on your DV camera tape with a total of 12-13 gig size, now you want to compress this down to fit on other media with least quality loss which is DVD and these for now only hold files of 4.7 gig so quality will be lost wheather noticable by the human eye or not.
SVCD is smaller in size but can use variable bit rates but much more quality loss.
VCD is smaller still and uses set bit rates and even greater quality loss.
Shrink down to what you want using computer proggies or quick no hassle standalone recorder (which on top quality record setting for 1 hour will give as good a result as using a computer).
Forget about copy protection, i dont think you will succeed where the movie studio giants have failed lol.
no region coding will be used but 25 fps. is pal system, and may have problems in other areas of the world.

[celtic_druid]

My advice would be to capture to a nice DV AVI and then convert the video from it to MPEG2 using say CCE. Then the audio to AC3. Could even have a go at some of the 2channel-->6channel techniques and do 5.1AC3.

Then just import your AC3 and M2V into your favourite athoring app, add menu, etc. if desired and burn.