Have I got a sufficient processor ??

[Screwball]

For over a year now I have found it impossible to burn a dvd using studio 9. I thought I had found a loophole by rendering it as an AVI, which has worked sometimes in the past, but my latest project, 35 minutes duration, consists of 60% stills and 40% video filled up a 40gb external hard drive before completing, so got nothing! I would still prefer to render as an mpeg but it crashes after about 3 minutes. Is it possible that my processor is not powerful enough? I have a AMD Athalon 1.67 ghz 608 mb ram - and an external 40 gb hard drive I keep exclusively for projects. Once burned, project removed and drive de-fragged. Is it possible to save as an AVI but apply some sort of compression?

[Ron P.]

What flavor of AVI are you rendering to? It has been mentioned numerous times on the forums, that AVI is nothing more then a container. Think of AVI like a grocery bag, until you put something into it, you have a bag and nothing more.

A slightly compressed, and considered loss-less, is the DV (avi), it is wrapped in the AVI container. You can also wrap MPEG4, DivX, and Xvid in the AVI container. DV takes about 13 gig per hour, however if you don't have at least double that in free HDD space, then you are flirting with problems.

Full uncompressed AVI (Audio Video Interleave) takes a mere 65 gig per hour. The files are so large that it can be extremely difficult at best to work with them. You would need about 130 gig (minimum) of free hdd space to work with Full AVI.

I do notice that you could possibly stand to upgrade your system, if you intend on video editing regularly. I would increase your RAM, to at least 1gig. What about internal HDDs? How many and sizes? Your processor is workable, it just is going to take longer for you do somethings that others can do quickly with the latest and greatest.

Summary: Your crash is more related to lack of real-estate. You might also consider re-installing VS9, because absent of the sync issues you should be able to use the MPEG format.

[Trevor Andrew]

For over a year now I have found it impossible to burn a dvd using studio 9. I thought I had found a loophole by rendering it as an AVI, which has worked sometimes in the past, but my latest project, 35 minutes duration, consists of 60% stills and 40% video filled up a 40gb external hard drive before completing, so got nothing! I would still prefer to render as an mpeg but it crashes after about 3 minutes. ?

Hi

I think you need to start from the very beginning.

How do you capture your video?
What are the capture properties.?

If you haven't already done so, read the recommended procedure and my quick guide below.

Even though your pc spec’ is a bit low you should still be able to produce a dvd.


Trevor

[Ken Berry]

I have VS9 installed on a laptop which only has a 1GHz P3 processor and 512 MB of RAM. The laptop has an external ASUS DL burner and it all works fine. I regularly use it for backup in the production of DVDs. It is obviously slower in the rendering part, but the actual burn takes exactly the same time, down to the second, as my P4 3GHz with HT and 2 GB RAM... So your computing power is not the problem per se (though might start to be if you upgrade to VS10).

As the others have said, real estate (hard disk space) seems to be your main problem at the moment. Even my laptop I have upgraded to 60GB. And with the price of hard disks having fallen so drastically in the past year or so, you should seriously consider getting a bigger one. To give an example: about 6 weeks ago, I bought a new 400 GB one for A$250 which at the current exchange rate is about 100 pounds sterling. I regard that as quite cheap, and it could be that prices are even lower in the UK.

As for first rendering to uncompressed or DV versions of AVI, well that has been covered from the space required point of view. But I should add that we do not regard that as being a safe practice anyway. In other words, you should be capturing and editing in DV as far as possible, and then converting it to DVD-compatible mpeg-2 (Share > Create Video File > PAL DVD) before you even open the burning module. You then insert the new mpeg-2s into the burning module. If you instead insert an AVI file, then you are expecting what is already a resource-challenged computer to do the very demanding tasks of converting the file to mpeg-2, preparing the menu, multiplexing the video and audio, and actually burning, all at once and on the fly. That's no-go territory for your current computer, I am afraid!

However, if your project is only 35 minutes long, even if you used the highest quality settings, that would only produce a DVD-compatible mpeg-2 which is around 2.5GB in size which should be easily burnt to DVD even with only a 40GB hard drive available. This is particularly so if, as you say, the 40 GB is all available to the project. So it strikes me that something else might be wrong. One possibility is that your external drive is not fast enough or there is something wrong with its connection to the computer. Is it via Firewire or USB? And if it is the latter in particular, if your computer is (as it seems) relatively old, it may only be using USB 1.0 which is definitely not fast enough for video editing. You definitely need USB 2.0 for that.

The only other thing I can think of is to wonder whether you have either the Nero or Roxio suites installed, and if so whether they contain the packet writing software module (drag and drop to burn). The Nero module is called InCD and is notorious for taking control of the burning process and not allowing access to it for other programs. You have to totally uninstall it if you have it. The Roxio module is similar though allows itself to be disabled internally, so you don't have to uninstall it, only disable it...