size issues

blk_diesel wrote on 5/18/2004, 7:36 AM

I just upgraded to DVDA2 and noticed that as I build the menu it gets over the size limit very quickly. I rendered a project in Vegas 5 which Windows showed was 4.15 gigs after render. DVDA2 indicated it was 4.5 when I dropped it onto the first menu page. I added an one minute intro video, jpegs for main and 2nd menu along with audio. DVDA2 showed the project was now 4.8 gigs. I checked the optimise and it also indicated I was over the limit. I prepared it in DVDA2 and checked the final folder. It showed the project as 4.35 gigs. I burned it with Nero and it worked just fine(Nero also showed the project as 4.35 gigs). Anyone else experienced this?

Comments

bStro wrote on 5/18/2004, 10:33 AM

blk_diesel wrote

Anyone else experienced this?

Yep. There's a recent thread about it in which a Sony rep has been participating.

Rob

johnmeyer wrote on 5/18/2004, 10:43 AM

I was the instigator of that thread. As you can tell by its title, I consider the code which creates the estimates to be pretty lousy. I was trying to "shame" the programmers into taking it seriously. I received several replies from Sony in that thread, which indicates that are at least looking at the issue.

The bottom line is that the amount of space that a project is going to take is knowable in advance, and it shouldn't take minutes of computation time to provide an estimate that is precise with a percent or less. By contrast, just yesterday, DVDA 2.0 once again told me that a project was going to be 5.2 Gbytes when rendered. I went ahead and rendered and you know what? It WAS over, but only by a little (less than 100 MBytes). The moral of the story is that if the software cries "Wolf," then you give up paying any attention. In this case, it required me to re-render. Sony's response has already been that they try to be conservative, and if I follow the advice in their estimates, I will never have to re-render. That is true, but I will also always create video encoded at a lower bitrate than it needs to be, and will always therefore have substandard quality video -- not exactly what I had in mind when I purchased a premium DVD authoring program.

Hopefully they will listen and fix this. They certainly did a good job of fixing a huge number of shortcomings and problems that were present in the 1.0c version of the program.