~very insightful. it's going to take me a little while to digest that. so you're saying that every clip past nine minutes requires additional individual formatting or something which adds noticably to the file size. so either avoid clips of that length or split them at the time of backing up.

at what point do you split up the 9 (or so) minute files? and how?

(ISO & UDF are brand new concepts to me)

"every clip past nine minutes requires additional individual formatting or something which adds noticably to the file size"

... ummm, nope. It's just that clips over 9 minutes are bigger than clips under 9 minutes, simply because they're longer. The actual figure is probably closer to 8 minutes 45 seconds or so, but it's not even the time that really matters. The point is that some files are bigger than 2GB, and a DV file reaches that point shortly under 9 minutes.

ISO & UDF are different ways of formatting an optical disc. ISO is more universal and can be accessed by just about any DVD drive, even on Macs. UDF is supposed to be universal too, but i've had a few cases where some older drives didn't recognize it. The one problem with ISO is that it doesn't allow files bigger than 2GB.

How would i split up a bigger clip? I'd put it on the timeline, highlight a section from the beginning about 8:45 long, and render loop region only to a new file. Move the loop region down the timeline to start exactly where the first section ended and render that region to a new file, repeating until the whole clip is done. Then i'd open up the original project and replace the long clip with the smaller pieces. Note that this is a whole lot easier to do if you think of it before you start editing. On the other hand, most any project i want to back up would be made of lots of little clips, and almost any project i do that has very long clips is probably a one-time transfer to DVD that will be chucked as soon as the finished DVD is accepted by the client.

Note that even if you do choose to go with UDF on double-layer discs you'll still be limited to 8.3GB which is about 37 minutes of DV. So if you have any clips longer than 37 minutes you'll still have to split them up before burning to discs.

Now, completely different approach ... there is software available that will lump all the files together into one single archive, then automatically split that archive across multiple DVDs for you in one step. No thinking or grouping required. WinRAR is one such beast. However, i usually recommend against this approach. The problem is, if one of the discs gets damaged there is a chance you won't be able to recover anything from any of them. If you manually group and burn separate discs yourself then losing one still leaves the others intact and usable.

~thanks for spelling that out. i'll have to slowly chew on it. what if you just throw in some EDIT>SPLIT EVENT's for longer clips while in the editing process. will they render as sectioned clips?

thanks for your time.

Splitting won't change how the files are rendered. You could add a million splits, render, and you'd still end up with one file containing everything on the timeline. You must select the part you want as a highlighted region, then render with "loop region only" checked. This will work whether you've split the event or not.

~so if you're going to curb length you must be mindful at capture.

That's a good idea. If you know you're going to be wanting a certain maximum file size you can set the capture program to automatically split. It's not absolutely necessary as you can always split up the file yourself afterwards. It would be a big time saver though.