I have made a program 17m 31secs in duration and the MPEG-2 encoder consistently freezes at 17m 12s. I am encoding from the time-line performing effects and edits at the same time at 9.5Mb/s max variable bit rate PAL for DVD. The resultant file is approximately 1G in size (is this a clue?). I have tried the alternative of encoding to DV first (no problem) resulting in a 3.8G file and then placing this on the timeline and encoding that - same result freeze at 17m 12s or 1G approx size. So two completely different sources - same result. Anyone know what's going on here? Is this a file size limitation of the MPEG-2 encoder? Thanks John I