Help please (file size)

[g_v_f_c]

Hello and good day. I am currently using VideoStudio 11 Plus as of the moment. In VideoStudio Editor, under the Share tab then Create Disc, I am experiencing problems. I have 12 video files which individually is 358 MB each. All in all, it is around 4.3 GB. The thing is, as soon as I drop one file into the timeline, the file registers as 3.11 GB in the 4.7 GB DVD. Why does that happen? How did it end up like that? I have a burned 4.7 GB DVD of the video files, in data format though and I want to make a DVD of my video files with menus with the program. I have transferred the files into my harddrive already. Now I am stuck because the files takes too much space in the DVD as the program indicates. Please help me. I really need to get this sorted out. Thank you very much for your time. More power and keep up the great job. Hope to get a reply soon.

[g_v_f_c]

Here's a snapshot of the problem I have.



Please help me out. Thank you very much.

[Ken Berry]

That's an easy one to answer, though not necessarily to solve. Your original files were encoded using the highly compressed XVid codec, and, though they use the .avi extension, they are really similar to mpeg-4 files. Being highly compressed means they are relatively small. However, a video DVD uses (and can only use) mpeg-2 format. So when you drop the files into Video Studio, it is telling you what size the files will be when they are uncompressed out to mpeg-2 (mpeg-2 uses much less compression than XVid and so files are much larger.)

While Video Studio should be able to do the decompression you have a couple of choices which have to be made. Clearly you can't decompress and have those 12 files as large mpeg-2 files on a single DVD -- not unless you want it to be such poor quality that it is probably not worth the effort. So first you have to decide how many files should fit on a single DVD. For high quality DVDs, you can fit an hour of video onto one DVD, using a bitrate of 8000 kbps, or a little more than an hour if you use one of the compressed audio formats such as Dolby or mpeg layer 2 (mp3 is also not part of the DVD standard).

Given that you are unlikely to get extremely high quality mpeg-2s after the conversion from XVid, you might want to consider a bitrate of 6000 kbps which will allow you to burn around 90 minutes of video (or a bit more with those compressed audio formats I mentioned) and still get good quality. Or if you want average quality, you could use a bitrate of 4000 kbps and burn around 2 hours of video to a DVD.

I mention this first, because the second question's answer is in part dependent on the choice you make as to the bitrate you want to use. And that is how to convert the XVid, and what settings to use in the conversion. Video Studio can do the conversion as long as you have the XVid codec on your computer, which I assume you have. However, it will probably be relatively slow. A faster option might be to use the freeware conversion program called SUPER which you can download at www.erightsoft.com/SUPER.html

Once you have converted them, you can open Video Studio again, and then drop the requisite number of converted files into the burning timeline till the DVD will be just about full. I say 'just about' because you also need to leave a little space if you plan to add a menu.