I cleaned up my hard drive but I am still getting the same message of not enough room to prepare the project.

Burn some of the bigger files to a dvd and delete them from the hard disk. If you take off 4 gigs and you had space to begin with before, that should do it. You could also buy an external drive for more space or if you have another drive use it by setting your prepare folder to that drive.

j razz

Options -> Preferences -> Burning tab.

Make sure that the default Prepare and the Temporary Files Folder both point to a disk drive that has sufficient space. The usual problem people have is that they prepare to a drive that has plenty of space, but have the temp folder on a drive that is almost full.

Both folders have the same amount of space. And both have more than enough space to prepare the project. But I am still getting that error message. This doesn't make sense.

Both folders have the same amount of space.

Sorry to get nit-picky, but "folders" don't have space. Drives do. (Guess I can't blame you for putting it that way, since the DVDA dialog box does. I think DVDA needs a lesson in terminology.)

Let's get specific, so we can figure out what's going on here:

What is the size of your project?

How many harddrives do you have installed in your computer?

How much space do you have available on each drive, if you have more than one?
How much on the only drive if you have only one?

When you go to Options -> Preferences -> Burning, what does it say under "Default Prepare Folder"? What does it say under Temporary File Folders?

Keep in mind that if both folders are on the same drive, then DVDA is reporting the same chuck of available space under each option (Prepare folder, Temporary folder), and not taking into account the fact that available space for one will be taken up by the other. ;-)

For example, say your project is about 4gigs. You need (at least) 4 gigs for the prepare files and (at least) 4 gigs for Temporary files, because DVDA isn't going to delete the temporary files until it knows the Prepare files are done and dusted. If both your Prepare folder and Temporary folder reside on your C drive, and your C drive has 5 gigs free, DVDA is going to report "5000 MB" (or if it's accurate, 5120 MB") for each folder because that's what that drive has available. (Refer back to my nit-picking at top -- folders have no tangible boundries...unless quotas are set, but that's not relevant here. I don't think.)

So, how much space do you really need, and how much do you really have?

Size of my project: 4KB

Under the Default and Temporary folder it says I have this much space: 21, 493.9 MB

20.9 GB of free space left on my hard drive. .

I just purchased an external DVD ReWritable drive.

Is there anything else in the current "prepare" folder when you attempt to do the prepare? I seem to recall seeing a strange error like that when I tried to prepare to a folder that just happened to have a subfolder in it with lots of stuff in the subfolder. Inadvertant mistake on my part; totally non-intuitive message on DVDA's part. It seemed to have tallied the space in the subfolder when deciding if there was enough room to build the DVD.

Nothing in the folder. I created a new folder on my desktop.

I just compressed some files so now I have more room on my hard drive, 35.6 GB

You only need 4.7GB, plus a little extra.

It still says there is not enough room in a folder to prepare the project. This makes no sense

Are you sure that your project is only 4kb? There is practically nothing there. I don' t think you ever stated if you had more than one hard drive, but if so, try using it instead. If not, try burning a different project to see if there is something amiss with just that project. Have you successfully burned a disc using DVDA?

j razz

My project is 10, 390.5 MB

It got up to around 80% when being prepared. Then it said "Warning: an era occured while writing a file. The reason for the error could not be determined"

I went to Optimize and the Menu was not compliant. It is only 0.5 MB. I followed the instructions in the manual and nothing worked.

"The estimated size of the project is larger than the default space available on media"

Are your drives formatted for FAT32 or for NTFS?

NTFS

Did you select the "fit to disk" option on the "Optimize" window?

Yes and it says it is too big to fit

1. Right-click on the drive letter in Windows Explorer.
2. Select "Properties."
3. Select the Tools tab.
4. Select "Check Now."
5. Select "Automatically Fix File System Errors.
6. Reboot.

The drive will be tested, and any file system errors will be fixed. Even with NTFS, it is possible to get file corruption when programs crash. It is possible that such corruption could cause the problem you are seeing. Doing this check will not hurt anything, and is probably worth doing a few times a year anyway.

I did everything you said and I still got the message

"The estimated size of the project is larger than the default space available on media"

I think I have figured out the problem. The disc holds 8.5 GB and my project is around 10.5

How do I format the project so I can burn it onto 2 discs? Sony had told me this could be done.

I had a similar problem. The problem is probably that the settings under the optimize section is not set to recompress the video file. Under the optimize window on the left side highlight the video file, the 10 gig file you mentioned. Over on the right side, up towards the top, select the video tab. Under that select the recompress section and select yes. Then click the fit to disc button.

That cured my problem. After doing that, DVDA should recompress the video file to fit the disc.