Hi Integ,

The reason Vegas is doing that is because it is assuming a high-end bitrate (the amount of data used per second) for the render, as most programs unfortunately do.
In a way, it's a good thing, a higher bitrate means more quality, as the file will use more data per frame to represent everything in the scene. If bitrate is too low, detail is lost, things get smudged, artifacts start showing like Macroblocks and Gibbs Effects, things that make it look bad in general (search for some examples of these things). The bitrate chosen usually will only fit a 1.5hour render onto a DVD5 (commercial DVDs were mainly DVD9's and would fit a 2hour movie nicely). These settings are great if you are producing commercial-level projects, but for home users, it's a little too big/cumbersome, but thankfully there's a number of things you can do to make even 4 hours fit easily on the 4300MB usable on a DVD:

A) You can render the file out using a different bitrate. Use the MPEG-2 templates if you are going to use a DVD, and if you are using 5GB discs, you're looking at about 5000k as your target bitrate to fit it on there (assuming a 192k or 160k audio bitrate). Use the PROGRAM STREAM templates and set a Variable Bitrate with an average of 5000k and set the Maximum as something higher, say 8000k (it'll give it room to make the faster motion parts look better/ represent them better) and a Minimum that is low (to give it room to squeeze scenes that are less complicated/less going on and it can really make em smaller, say 1000k. Then, you can plug this output file into DVD Architect (since you have the Platinum version that came with DVDarch) and write your movie to a folder or directly to a DVD from there.

B) You can use a larger disc. There are Double/Dual Layer DVDs, holding 9GB, which will fit your 'high-bitrate-suggested' version that Vegas is assuming to make, which at one time wasn't publicly available. You can purchase these now easily at computer stores (heck even Walmart these days) or online and use those for your movies. They will keep much of the detail of the original with the assumed/used high bitrate that Vegas is trying to offer you.

C) You could render it out at whatever bitrate it is trying to do and reduce it later. Using third-party programs (lots of them out there) you can tell it to 'squeeze down' a DVD-9GB to a DVD-5GB output, then write that to a DVD5, if that's all you have. Set the highest settings those programs will allow you, as the quality will of course suffer.


A personal suggestion, is to adjust things a bit in Vegas to make it look optimal (especially when using MPEG-2 renders). I like to adjust the color so things are a bit darker, so there is more room for the codec to 'squeeze' detail from, yet at the same time, I like to add some Noise to the video (you can use Grain too), which will help it hide the artifacts that usually show up after MPEG-2 compression. Depending on your footage, it will also make your recordings more 'film-like' and give them a 'film quality' feel to them to have a nice light grain happening on them.
Experiment with it and have fun!

integrity,
in MSP, remember to render separate video and audio files using the DVD A compliant templates (see the SCS KB 1105 link). Otherwise DVD AS will recompress the audio.
https://www.custcenter.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/84/

Thanks for all the advice, everyone. However, based on the filesize, I would assume that only 1 hour of video can fit on a DVD disc, as Movie Studio produces it. After all, I had 1 hour and 50 minutes of video, and that produced a filesize of over 8 GB. You would have to have 1 hour or less of video to get down to 4 GB.

Oddly enough, the two mgp2 files I imported were a total of 5.25 GB. Sad that burning to disc turns them into an 8.59 GB file. But I understand what has been said here. Looks like that option should only be used if the video file is 1 hour or so.

integrity,
as said above, you need to lower the bitrate to get to the target file size.
True, that cannot be done using the MSP Make Movie wizard (burning from the timeline).
It can be done using MSP and DVD AS, as described above.
Use a bitrate calculator to estimate the bitrate needed to make the MPEG fit to a DVD.

If you have purchased MSP 12, you' ll have DVD Architect Studio 5.0. One project option there allows you to make a single movie file without menus.

Short answer:

Burning a DVD in Movie Studio defaults to a bitrate of 6Mbps.
For 1 hr, 50 min of video on 4.35 (not 4.7) GB, you need a lower average bitrate.
You do that by rendering a compliant DVD Architect video in Vegas.

@integrityvideo

No, you are definitely not limited to 1 hour on a DVD. You could put as many hours as you want on a DVD disc, you just have to deal with the lower bitrate as you add more, stopping when it starts to not look 'good enough' for you. 4 hours can easily be kept on a DVD, it's just showing how Vegas is estimating the size, based on a high-bitrate (more 'standard') DVD format. Choose one of those three options I provided earlier, and you'll be able to fit all of it on a DVD just fine. Good luck with it!

I think the OP was in fact referring to how much to "fit on a DVD disc, as Movie Studio produces it," i.e. using the Make Movie wizard (burning from the timeline).
Use the wizard's default bitrate given by musicvid and a bitrate calculator to see how much will go on a DVD that way.
The options are made clear in a couple of current threads.