I am using ULead DVD MovieFactory 2SE to create my DVDs after rendering from MS. How do I burn a 2 hour+ long video to DVD? It seems like MF will not allow burns to DVDs longer than 1 hour. Am I doing something wrong or do I have to use another software to burn long running programs?
You're not doing anything wrong, you're just limited by the 4.7 Gbyte limit of single layer DVDs. There's been a lot of discussion about this in this forum, but your choices boil down to these:-
Keep the quality as it is and burn to multiple DVDs
Use a different encoder, such as TMPGEnc, and reduce the quality settings so that you use less disk space (that option may already be in MF)
Use the encoder in MS and then shrink the mpeg file with a program like Rejig
Which version of MF are you using? V3 can use AC-3 audio, which should save you some space.
Thanks Ian. I am using V2 of MF. The way I am getting around this now is to lay back to a long DV tape and then firewire record to a stand-alone Pioneer DVD recorder which allows me to adjust the compression to give me 2 hrs+ recording time.
If I encode in MS and shrink the file using Rejig, how does that translate to the ultimate VOB file on the DVD?
>If I encode in MS and shrink the file using Rejig, how does that translate to the ultimate VOB file on the DVD?
The VOB file contains the video in mpeg2 and the audio. If you take Ralph413's advice and use mpeg audio, the VOB and mpeg files will be the same size. The problem's with the DVD standard - if you're using PAL, the standard allows mpeg audio or AC-3. Both are compressed formats so the audio doesn't take up too much space. In NTSC, the standard specifies AC-3 or PCM (wav), and PCM takes up a lot of room. Until recently AC-3 encoders were around $150, too expensive to be a reasonable option.
Using mpeg audio depends on whether or not you can play it - a lot of DVD players can, especialy the cheaper ones, but you need to consider who else may be getting copies.