How to tell how much room is left

Norcalbay wrote on 9/13/2006, 10:47 AM

Where does the program tell me if i have gone over the limit or if i have space left when trying to burn a home movie to DVD

Comments

bStro wrote on 9/13/2006, 11:28 AM

It tells you at the bottom right of the screen.

Now for the bad news: It's almost always wrong.

DVD Architect is not very good at estimating the eventual size of your DVD project. I can't recall if the technical reasons have ever been explained to me, but if they have, it either went over my head or I've forgotten. And honestly, by this point, I don't care. The estimates are rarely important for my workflow.

Anyhow. Before I go into more details about how to be reasonably (98%) sure that your project will fit on a disc, tell us more about your situation.

1) Which version of DVD Architect are you using? DVD Architect Studio 2.0 or 3.0? DVD Architect 1, 2, 3, or 4? (The former comes with Vegas Movie Studio, the altter with full-blown Vegas.)

2) Are you adding MPEG2 files to your project, or are the videos AVI or some other format? If they're MPEG2, got to File -> Optimize DVD and tell us what you see on the left. Where do you see checkmarks, where do you see yellow diamonds with exclamation points?

3) How much video are you wanting to put in this project? Twenty minutes? An hour? Two hours? This will determine what bitrate you want to encode at, if your files aren't already encoded to MPEG2. (There's also DVDA's Fit to Disc feature, again, if the files aren't already MPEG2s.)

4) Are you using single layer DVDs or dual layer? If they're single layer, you have about 4.3GB to use. Dual layer, somewhere around 8GB or so.

With more infofmation, you should be able to help you get around DVD Architect's estimation issues.

Rob

KayAt wrote on 9/13/2006, 10:16 PM

I am also interested in this answer.

I have DVD Architect 3.0 that I have just began using.

I was hoping to use the avi files and not have to encode these with TMPGenc

I want to put 1 hr and 30 minutes on one dvd with only one menu (more if allowed but could work with only one)

I'm using a single layer DVD.

Will I be better off using something else to encode these to MPG2 before trying to author, or can I use the DVD Architect encoder?

I know that the total amount of GBs of the raw .avi files is more than 4.3 Gbs but after encoding it should be a lot less, shouldn't it?

bStro wrote on 9/14/2006, 8:49 AM

You can let DVD Architect do the encoding. Add any files you need, make whatever adjustments you want to the project, and then go to File -> Optimize DVD and hit the button marked Fit to Disc.

If you did encode it elsewhere first, I'd recommend using Vegas rather than TMPGEnc. And you would want to use a bitrate calculator to determine the best bitrate for a video of that length. DVDA's Fit to Disc feature takes care of that by doing the calculations itself.

Rob