RE: DVD Data files too large

Maverick wrote on 8/22/2003, 8:11 AM
Hi

I have a project that is 45 mins and 36 seconds long (give or take a few frames). It includes 5.1 Surround sound.

I encoded the Video and audio separately as MainCocept MPEG-2 PAL DVD and AC3 respectively. I set up DVDA with one main menu with three items;

1.Play
2. Scene Selection
3.Music

The scene selection has three pages each containing 7 items.

The music section has 11 tracks each lating around three minutes and already encoded as AC3 but are not 5.1 encoded.

All this gets prepared without problems but when I attempt to burn to DVD +RW I get a message informing me that the media isn't large enough to take all the data. It then asks me if I want to go ahead anyway. My questions are;

If I agree to go ahead anyway what is liable to be missing on the final burnt DVD?

is there sometjing I may have done wrong to amke the data too large?

How can I reduce the final size without losing any muic tracks or shorening the movie?

The folder containg the prepared DVD data holds 5.35 GB.

Please help

Cheers

Comments

BillyBoy wrote on 8/22/2003, 9:51 AM
You're a little over the limit of what can fit on a DVD. So you can use a lower bitrate to make it fit. I have never needed to, since I keep close watch while building the menu system (note the value in the extreme lower right corner as you drag files into workspace) so I'm not sure if the process is totally automatic or not. I suspect it is. I do know there is a slider where you can manually set to compress more. Nothing gets chopped off, just what needs to be compressed is to make everything fit. Compressing more will reduce quality somewhat. As long as you're only doing a little, your project is 5.35 GB where the limit is 4.7 GB you probably will be happy with the result.

I suggest you burn to a RW format so if you don't like the result you can simply erase the disc, right from within DVD-A. If you use a -R or +R media its a burn once deal.
Maverick wrote on 8/22/2003, 10:08 AM
Strange thing is the slider in the optimise window, even when set to lowest bitrate, indicated an estimated file size of over 6GB. I Lowered the bitrate to a little over 6000 and set it to burn and it started burning. It's still doing so now so I'll let you know the result.

BTW, I have burnt the project before but not as separate stream just all as MPEG-2. I have also added just one 3 minute audio track as an AC3. Would the difference between rendering out of Vegas as MPEG-2 and separate MPEG-2 & AC3 streams make such a difference in size?

Would adding the audio (music ) tracks as mp3 help or would they then get rendered to AC3 anyway?

Cheers
Maverick wrote on 8/22/2003, 10:21 AM
Righ, I think I have found what the problem could be but not too sure what to do about it.

What I did was re-edit the audio for the project into 5.1 Surround then render as separate streams.

I then dragged the new MPEG-2 file over the old one in the DVDA time line expecting it to overwrite the old one. When I check the Optimise window carefully I can see both the old MPEG-2 file (with audio) and the new MPEG-2 video only files listed both at over 45 minutes. So, how do I remove the older MPEG-2 file as there doesn't seem to be a way within the Optimise window?

Help please.
Maverick wrote on 8/22/2003, 10:58 AM
I deleted the old mpeg and AC3 files for my project and reloaded DVDA. When it asked for the file I clicked to ignore them.

What I found was that Optimise still showedthe MPEG-2 file as still there. I thought it best to preview everything and see what happens and that's where I met this problem;

The play button was fine it played the latest MPEG-2 file along with it's related AC3 file. But when I went to the Scene selection nothing would play from there. It seems that it was expecting the old file.

When I replaced the files I hadn't changed the Chapter markers at all so I expected the scene selection to work but the time line within the Scene Selection windows is blank.

So, do I now have to re-do the Scene Selectionmenus or is there a way I can have the curent ones point to the new MPEG-2 file?

Cheers
Maverick wrote on 8/22/2003, 11:32 AM
Update

I found that I could go through all the Scene Selection objects changing the pointers to the new mpeg-2 & AC3 files.

Previewing shows that they all play from the correct points.

But when I load the DVDA file it still asks for the old MPEG. In Optimise it clearly shows that this is being used for Audio but I can't see where this could be. Can anyone offer some light into where else I can start looking as I have checked all objects and pages and it doesn't apper there.

Cheers