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Hello,

I recently purchased the above as I'd used Ulead products before & found them very good & this new version was about the only one I could find that offered Blu-ray authoring & burning. Last week, I tried it properly for the 1st time and recorded 1 hour of television onto the hard drive which was showing as being 1.5gb in size. But when I went to burn it to disk, it was showing as using up over 16gb on the 25gb disk. Now I realise that the menu would take up some additional space but not 14.5gbs worth.

One of my reasons for getting a laptop with a blu-ray burner was so that I could burn a lot of stuff onto single disks, but that obviously won't be the case if a 1 hour programme takes up 16gb. Does anynoe know if this is normal or if I've done something wrong or any other suggestions?

Why type of file are you trying to burn onto Blu-ray? Is this a TS file? I'm thinking you are adding an hour's worth of footage, 16GB of data is indeed a lot, but maybe you should remove your menus.

It was recorded using Haupauge WinTV but I'm not sure what type of file they're saved as. It certainly took a long while for VideoStudio to convert it before burning. I only used one of the generic menus included with VideoStudio, so I can't imagine it's that causing the problem, but I will try removing it to see what difference that makes. Glad I'm using a rewritable disk for sure as they're not cheap.

If you are using VS to burn a Blu-Ray disc (Share > Create Disc > Blu-Ray), then it will be converted to Blu-Ray format. That uses a much higher bitrate and frame size than standard definition video. As such, the final Blu-Ray file which it is converted to will be very much larger than the original. This would account for the large discrepancy.

Unfortunately, I don't yet have a Blu-Ray burner. But the only thing I can think of would be to burn your SD files to Blu-Ray as data files, as opposed to video files. That would mean that your WinTV files are stored on the Blu-Ray disc in their original format. But you can't use VS for that, and in any case, I am not sure that a Blu-Ray player could necessarily read such data files in order to play them back over your TV.

Thanks Ken, that makes sense, though seemingly that would mean I'd only get about 90 mins footage on a 25gb disk, which is obviously disappointing & not much use, especially with SD footage like that.

I'll have to try & work out how to get more on there, if it's actually possible. Thanks to you & Zclyh3 for the advice/suggestions.

Did you try encoding using a lower bit rate? If you do a custom render, you can adjust the rendering specifications and use a lower bitrate for the final mpeg file. You should be able to squeeze many hours of SD video on a blu-ray disk if you keep the bitrate around 6000 to 8000 bps.

Thanks for that John. I haven't tried that no. Only just having first plays with it so finding my way around. I'll have a look when next home and give that a try. Thanks.

That should work, though I suspect it can only be done in the burning process itself. I don't think you can create a Blu-Ray template using Make Movie Template Manager. So if you select Share > Create Video File > Blu-Ray, you are stuck with the two default options (1920 x 1080 and 1440 x 1080), and the lower bitrate for those is still a very high 18000 kbps.

But in the burning module, if you have selected Share > Create Disc > Blu-Ray, you click on the middle of the three icons in the bottom left of screen, then select the Change MPEG settings button, then Customise. Then on the compression tab, you can lower the default bitrate. You might also want to change the frame format on the first General tab to 720 x 576 if your original video is PAL or 720 x 480 if NTSC.

Tried lowering the bitrate last night and that seemed to work as the one hour was only using 4gb of space rather than the 16gb it was using previously, so thanks for the advice. Seemingly the lowest you can set it for was something like 8800 bps for recording to blu-ray, but that would still mean 5-6 hours on a 25gb disk which is ok, though obviously I'll still be playing around a bit before putting stuff on a non-rewritable disk. Thanks all.