Most of my DVD's are movies of 10 to 20 minutes, but I have produced at least 2 with hour long mpgs. As mikkie said, they are broken up into smaller vobs, but if you bring the full hour long mpg into the authoring program, it will play on the DVD as a continuous 1 hour movie. The other point, chapters, which you probably want depends on whether your software can set them or not.

I have also taken a 1 hour movie and broken it up into three sections that can each be independantly accessed from a menu. However, if the user starts the first section it will continue on and play sections 2 and 3 contiguously. Your authoring software needs to be able to set "end-actions" to do this.

Based on my experience:

If you create one long MPEG2 file, then the authoring software will create several VOBs out of them. Each VOB in the finished VIDEO_TS folder will be no longer than 1GB. Your player will link from one VOB to the next without any pause.

If, instead, you create several MPEG2 files, and bring them separately into your authoring program, my experience is that the program will create a separate "Title" (not to be confused with the title of a video) for each of the separate MPEG2 files. Though these "Titles" can be linked to play in sequence, there will be a short pause of perhaps 1/2 second or so in many (perhaps all) players.

I ran into this issue last fall because I am working on a W98SE system, and thus the largest avi I can deal with is 4GB (about 18 minutes). Since I was using CinemaCraft as my MPEG2 encoder, I needed to keep the input files under 4GB. I suppose if I use the MPEG2 encoder in VV3 I wouldn't have that limitation, since VV3 can deal with single projects much longer than that, and I assume it would feed the separate 4GB chunks to the MPEG2 encoder as needed. In that case my only limitation would be to keep the final MPEG2 file under 4GB, which would be easy to do.

Yeah, as a newbie on authoring, I find this of interest. You need to know what the authoring software will do for you. I have just finished my first project burning 4 DVD's (Mpeg2) with the longest being about 50 minutes. That VV3 created Mpeg2 file was about 2 GB (6 hours renderon P III 600mhz). A point is, if you have to re-render many times, it is a "bore". You should not have problems with an hour I would think. I am also fortunate to have a burner and player that reads "quite a few formats." Using +RW had been great for trial and error before the final +R. Keep searching this site. Lots of great help scattered around.

I would say it depends on your DVD Authoring software. I have Ulead DVD Movie Factory and with that software, you pretty much have to have one big mpeg file or the DVD will return to a menu after it plays each clip, which is a major drawback of the Ulead product. Hoping SF makes it feasible for me to upgrade when DVD Architect is available.

I find I can generally get 100 minutes of video onto a DVD-R when using the Main Concept NTSC DVD template.

Thanks everybody. I'll give it a shot this weekend.
Have a good one.

Paul

Multiple mpegs = multiple Titles = multiple pauses.

One mpeg with however many Chapters = no pauses.

Al

> the DVD will return to a menu after it plays each clip, which is a major drawback of the Ulead product

You may want to consider an upgrade to DVD Movie Factory 2. This doesn’t return to the menu unless you tell it to. (i.e, its now under your control) You can play an entire DVD filled with MPEGs without having to return to the menu. This is a great new feature of DVD MF2.

~jr

I'll wait to see what SF has to offer.

Had the same problem pmc181.

Here's what worked for me -
Ulead DVD workshop 1.2

Although I don't recommend buying it, nor anything from Ulead (they stink)
Download DVDWS 1.2 30day free trial from Ulead website (that should keep ya going till Sofo DVD architect comes out!!)

Render the project from the Vegas timeline into one big fat mpeg (Be sure to mark the time where you want chapters IN vegas - pain to do it in workshop)

Then plop it into DVD Workshop. Set your chapters points and should be good to go.
Using this method (well with DVD authoring software i have tried), you get smooth transitions plus you can skip chapters.

Couple Warnings/issues:
-If you have win98, don't ever install DVD workshop 1.3 (it will hose everything up on your sys)
Trial version has the following limitations:
-The Motion Menu feature is limited to five seconds.
-Maximum of 10 slide shows for one DVD title.
-Maximum of 20 images for one slide show.
-Maximum of 20 chapter points for one video clip.
-No custom highlight color settings.
-Limited text effects.
-Fewer menu templates, frames, objects, buttons and background images.