Help!! DVD not big enough!??!

[Jonni the Saint]

Hi all,

any help with this one would be appreciated, thanks.

I am trying to burn out a DVDWS project that is made up of four clips which i have encoded using Procoder. There is a basic menu with text buttons and a single image jpeg background.... pretty straightforward.

When i go to burn/ finish stage, DVDWS does all the multiplexing / finalizing VOB etc then gives an error 'Disc space not enough, insert a new disc to retry or press cancel to stop the process. Error 93006:1:5'

It is showing 3.8 / 20.9 in the required / available HDD space and 3.8 / 4.4 in the required / available disc space.

I have just over 70 mins of footage in 4 clips so have chosed the 'good quality' setting (max 90 about 90mins according to Ulead).

Any idea why this might be happening as it would seem that i am within the limits of what is able to be burnt on to a single DVD....?
I have tried several quality settings but keep getting the same thing.... grrrr. Also noticed that as i change the quality settings, the required / available disc space does not change....? maybe this is related?

Thanks a lot if you can help.

Cheers
Jonni

[heinz-oz]

How much free space do you have on your HD? When did you defrag it last? What OS are you using? Anything less than Win XP or 2000 with NTFS file system will have a 4GB filesize limit.

[DVDDoug]

I have tried several quality settings but keep getting the same thing.... grrrr.

I suspect you've checked the do not convert compliant files box, so the qualtiy settings aren't having any effect. Uhhh.... I forget exactly where that check-box is.

In fact, you probably do not want to re-code... you should try setting procoder to a lower bitrate.

You can burn the DVD files to you hard disk only, to get an idea of how much too-big they are.

Sometimes I use DVDshrink to fit the hard drive "image" onto a DVD-R... but the double-encoding (probably) reduces the quality compared to a single encode at the "right" bitrate.

[ploggy]

enable the "convert to disc template" in the options panel to force the software to encode the videos according to the 90min template you selected.

[Jonni the Saint]

ahhh... thanks to the people who responded... much appreciated.

So i now realise that my footage encoded in Procoder was at too high a bit rate to fit on a 4.4 gb DVD.

I tried checking the "convert to disc template" box for each clip and this will obviously burn out fine but will take a long time and the footage will have been encoded twice which i gather is not so good for quality.

So the questions are(!):

- i have 115 mins of footage (plus basic menu). Is there a way to caluculate the bitrate i should encode with in Procoder to allow this amount of footage to fit onto a single DVD? Maybe someone knows of a small app. that does bitrate calcuation like that>??

- what is the quality of the Ulead encoder like within DDWS? I am tempted to just import my clips as QT ref files and let DDWS chug away for a long time to make them fit onto a single disc... but would Procoder give me a better (higher quality) result?

Thanks again for the help.

Cheers,
Jonni

[GeorgeW]

here's one of my favorites:
Bitrate Calculator

[Devil]

Purely from hearsay, I believe that Procoder is quite good. The DVDWS2 encoder is also quite good. Cannot tell you which is better, but they are possibly pretty much on a par, especially if you invoke the Advanced properties.

However, it is a cardinal sin to try and encode at too high a bitrate, even for short projects. On DV25/DVCAM projects, for example, there is nothing to be gained going higher than 6000 kbit/s, as a general rule, but not all DVD players will play higher bitrates glitch-free, anyway! For longer projects, I always aim for filling a DVD to a max of about 4.1 Gb.

[Kontiki]

I do not used Procoder so am not sure what functions it has. I do use Soreson which alows you to choose the size of the completed encoded file. This makes life so very easy.