Alludo USER to USER Web Board

I am new to the Forum and I am very impressed with its quality and professionalism. I purchased VSProX2 two months ago but I am not new to video editing (started with Pinnacle but switched to Ulead because of frequent Out of Sync problems, then upgraded to VSProX2 recently; to date I have successfully edited about 8 full-fledge videos of trips made with a duration of 1:30 to 2:00 hours each with mainly photos and some videos inserted).

Per your instructions I spent the last couple of days reading extensively the manual and many postings and tutorials (like workflows) to avoid posting already covered topics but still have questions all related to above topic for which I could not find an answer:

1. In ¡§Create Disc¡¨, what does the green/yellow/red bars really mean and do to the video in the ¡§Required disc space¡¨ (I know intuitively that it should be like the bars in a burn program like Nero but it acts differently per my next questions) ?

2. Why a yellow bar if the green represents the maximum available disc space and red indicating that we exceeded it ?

3. Why does it at times burn successfully to a disc even with yellow and red bars ? (I did burn a 1:34hr VSP project video successfully on a 4.7G disc even with yellow and red bars)

4. What does the Gb numbers in brackets mean versus the preceeding number ? (above video of 1:34hr showed required space 2.97Gb (3.28Gb) at beginning of green bar and available space 4.38(4.70Gb) at end but with a yellow and a red bar)

5. If it did burn successfully even with yellow and red bars, it must have ¡§fit to disc¡¨: I guess my quality was degraded even if my project properties still show a DVD quality of 640x480 ?

6. Per your workflow suggestion, I then decided to create my new trip video on VSProX2 using the ¡§Create video file¡¨ first (.mpg), then open VSProX2 in ¡§Create disc/Open file¡¨ and added a simple menu (2Mb according to program) to end up on a 8.5Gb dual layer disc with 7.89(8.47Gb) required with green bar (layer 1 & 2) and a yellow bar even with 7.96(8.55Gb) available disc space indicated at end of bar; why the yellow bar if it fits ?

7. I tried the same .mpg file by inserting it in the timelime instead, then did ¡§Create disc¡¨ and added the same menu (2Mb) and it showed only a green bar (layer 1&2) with 6.37(6.84Gb), so much less space required for the same .mpg file though compliant): why ????

Help please as I don¡¦t understand the logic here !

Thanks !

Instead of dropping your DVD Compliant MPEG-2 file into the Editor timeline and then opening the burn module, start with a clean timeline in the editor, press Share>Create Disc (open the burn module). Once you have the burn module open, now press the icon to insert video file, and insert your DVD Compliant MPEG-2 file into the timeline of the burn module. You should get a more accurate reading on your disc space.

The green/yellow/red bars are indications of whether or not your video will fit the size of disc you have selected.

1:
Green = yes it will fit
Yellow = might fit or might go slightly over (Program can only guess at this stage)
Red = the program has estimated that the finished result will be too large to fit this disc.

2:
See answer above.

3:
see answer above

4:
This used to confuse me as well. Taking just the one number 4.38(4.70Gb)
Confusingly a 4.7 GB DVD disc only holds 4.3 worth of Data. Even now I would have to look it up

In fact here is an answer "stolen" from elsewhere

You're talking about two different measurements, and they're both EXACTLY the same. For your first calculation, you are incorrectly applying the measurement--4.7 is not multipliable by 1024, since the 4.7 GB number is NOT a binary-derived number.

In the hardware world (including DVD discs, hard drives, zip disks, any other kind of storage), 1 MB=1000 KB. 1 GB=1000 MB. Pretty simple stuff. 4.7 GB here is equal to 4700 MB, and so on and so forth.

The software world, however, chose to make things a little more complicated, wherein 8 bits = 1 byte. Since computers operate in binary code (meaning 1s and 0s), we calculate different classes of size in powers of 2. 2 to the power of 10 is a KiloByte, 2 to the 20th is a MegaByte, 2 to the 30th is a GigaByte. Doing all these conversions, 1 GigaByte (GB) is equal to 1,073,741,824 Bytes.

The difference between the two measurements is a factor of 1073741824/1000000000, or 1.07. 4.7 GB/1.07=roughly 4.39 GB.

5:
Your best bet if things are not clear that the completed "Disc" will fit is to burn to hard drive folders - this way you will know for certain the size of the completed project. You can then burn the DVD folders to Disc with suitable software - or whilst burning to hard drive folders, also select the option to create an ISO file and burn that.

6:
See above - the coloured bars are indications of the expected file size - these are calculated guestimates.

7:
Dont worry so much!!!