i'ts already ac3 audio. any other suggestions?

I also face this problem, to the point that my carefully crafted MPG, tailored to have the right size, does not fit in the DVDA project :-(((

Oddly, it fits into Dazzle DVD Complete ...

Indeed, this is quite strange, I wonder if SoFo would care to comment:

My MPEG-2 file was created on Vegas 4.0c with the PAL DV MainConcept codec. Audio is PCM stereo. This file is 3,703,177 KB (as reported by Explorer).
Within DVDA 1.0c (PAL project at the default bitrate of 8,000 Mbps, and PCM audio) the reported size of the same file appears as 4,957.0 MB

* * * WHY ??? * * *

I prepared my file with 3.7 GB (fair enough, considering that the DVD has 1 GB more than that). This corresponds to a movie 1h21m30s long.
Why can't I squeeze it inside the DVD ??? (well, I can, but only if I reduce the bitrate down to 5,800 which seems unnacceptable).

Why this silly behaviour ???

Do you have any menus? The menus add space... or is just that one file?

Also, a DVD is actually only just over 4GB I think, not 4.7? A GB is not always a GB. (ie 1000x1000x1000 bytes versus 1024x1024x1024 bytes)

The last DVD that I did was 4GB in windows explorer and 4.5GB in DVDA even before adding menus. In my opinion this is a software glitch that needs to be addressed. I started using DVDA because I wanted to have motion menus. Motion menus are cool but it's frustrating when my perfectly encoded mpeg2 is too big fit onto one DVD. Fotrtunately, I still have my old faithful program SpruceUp. It's not fancy but gets the job done without adding any mystery space. Hopefully one of Sonics developers will respond to our concerns.

I have to ask........when and how did you tell DVDA to use AC3 audio, and did you encode AC3 audio in Vegas.

If not, try encoding AC3 audio in Vegas, than during the chapter marking phase, drag your file up and to the right, to where it has your file name, and mostly likely, mpg audio.

EdK, I don't understand your point. But anyway, it makes no sense rendering 2-chanel stereo (like mine) to AC-3. PCM stereo uses 2 audio channels. AC-3 uses 6. If you render to AC-3 you will end up with 6 audio channel, of which 4 are empty, but using space anyway. Worse than rendering PCM stereo.

philfort, my menu is 47 MB, not very big.
also, I *think* that a 4.7GB DVD has 4.7*1024*1024*1024 = 5046586573 bytes

videocheez, I would like to know if it is really a glitch. Indeed, DVDA reports that project will be 130% of DVD size, but accepts to author it. I wonder how much will be th *real* size of it ?
Anybody has experienced the difference between estimated size by DVDA and real size on ready DVD ?

SoFo, why don't you have anything to say ??!!??

>>>>"If you render to AC-3 you will end up with 6 audio channel, of which 4 are empty, but using space anyway. Worse than rendering PCM stereo".<<<<<

Sorry "sqblz", but I think you are wrong, unless I have been misinformed, AC3 audio takes up very little space. Compared to PCM and Mpg Audio, which can be up to 1GB of space.

The space availble on a DVD is approximately 4.35GB..........

Ed

you can look this up but ac3 will take much less space due to the compression...my recollection was that a 192 or 256kbps of pcm audio needs roughly 1.5mbps bandwidth whereas ac3 would need only roughly 448kbps bandwidth, a huge difference...this translates to a lot of disk space savings - sorry I don't have the #'s but that's just one of the benefits of the ac3 license you get w/ this product.

I encoded to ac3 using a freeware program called ac3 machine. I did this after extracting audio from my source avi. I multiplexed that ac3 with streaming audio using bbmpeg, another freebie. I'll try your suggestion letting vegas do the ac3 encoding. I hope it won't taker long ac3 machine takes about 10min for 1:50 movie.

That make sense but my source ac3 is only 2 channel, no 5.1 for my latest encode.