I am using MAGIX Movie Edit Pro 10.

I have finally got some holiday DVD footage transferred to my hd. The footage has been edited and enterred into the edior timeline. Total length of film is 1hour 36 mintes.

I have some Verbatim 16x DVD+R 4.7GB 2 hour blank disks.

When i switch to the CD/DVD editor and hit the burn button it reports 4556/4482MB and hitting the next burn button I get a warning that the project requires 4556MB of space and I may need to split the movie.

As it said may i went ahead and tried to burn the movie anyway.

After nearly 2 hours of encoding it spat the dvd out and told me i needed a bigger disk!

The dvd has 2hours of capacity and 4.7GB so why wont it burn a 4.556GB movie lasting only 96minutes?

One thing that I have noticed.
The movie occupies only a third of the timeline, the rest is empty and the movie keeps playing for up to 5 hours with no footage.
Is this normal or should I be cutting the empty segment off? If so How? Cos I've tried to select the empty area and it won't let me - unless I'm doing it wrong.

I can help with the first part of your question but not the 5 hours of blank video on the timeline one as I have never used MAGIX Movie Edit Pro.

If you ever see your movie size being reported to being that close to the disk's capacity then think again about some of the encoding parameters (come on to that in a mo). That value represents the movie size only, and possibly not any of the DVD menu animations, graphics and sounds. In addition some authoring packages encode the audio into the movie as PCM which is really inefficient. I would see about converting the audio to an elemental stream and then encoding it as AC3 (use a tool like ffmpeggui). Use that audio as the source in the authoring tool.

Secondly - bit rates! There are two ways of encoding MPEG2. Constant Bit Rate (CBR) and Variable Bit Rate (VBR). If you have a nice short movie then you would typically use CBR and have a maximum bit rate set (around 9.8Mb/s for MPEG 2). However, in your case as space is a premium you will have to play around with the VBR settings. You can usually define a range. I would say you want it to be no less than 3Mb/s and no more than 6, possibly 7Mb/s (start with 7 and see what the resultant file size is). Keep reducing the maximum until it will comfortably fit on to your DVD.

So, try the audio encoding first and see if that helps. If not then look at ensuring you are set to use VBR and reducing the maximum until it fits in comfortably.

A great resource btw for all things on this subject is: www.videohelp.com

Good luck.

__________________
Lloyd

That's my opinion. If you don't like it I have others

System: Apple Macbook Pro 17, and an external Freecom 500GB eSATA drive.
Software: Final Cut Studio 2 (FCP 6, Motion 3, Soundtrack Pro 2, Color, DVD Studio Pro 4, Compressor 3), Sonicfire Pro 4.5
Favourite Resources: Findsounds.com, Free DVD menus, Ken Stone's FCP Page, Wikivid

As Lloyd says, but download a Bitrate Calculator and this will tell you the bitrate settings you need to be below to make the video fit.

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Edius Pro 4 Broadcast, Edius DVX, ADVC300 -- PremPro 2.0, Matrox RT X100

I use MEP10, but have only used it as an editor, not a DVD authoring package. For DVDs I always export as MPEG2, setting the compression parameters to what I need first, then use DVD-Lab or Nerovision to author and finally use Nero to burn the DVD.

__________________
Fav quote - "Experience is whatcha don't get 'till ya don't need it no more."

System - Athlon 1.4GHz, Win98, Hauppauge PVR250 receiver and compressor.
Software -Magix Movie Edit Pro 10, Nero 6 + NeroVision Express, Moho 4.61, PSP 8.1, Bryce, Quicktime 6.52 pro, Goldwave 5, DVD-Lab.
Cameras - Panasonic GS9, Canon ES8400V, Canon EOS D20 and Canon A70

Good idea!

__________________
Lloyd

That's my opinion. If you don't like it I have others

System: Apple Macbook Pro 17, and an external Freecom 500GB eSATA drive.
Software: Final Cut Studio 2 (FCP 6, Motion 3, Soundtrack Pro 2, Color, DVD Studio Pro 4, Compressor 3), Sonicfire Pro 4.5
Favourite Resources: Findsounds.com, Free DVD menus, Ken Stone's FCP Page, Wikivid

Thanks for the replies. I probably didn't take into account menus etc but I also recently noticed that the DVDs only hold 4.3gb not the stated 4.7 that is printed on the disk.
So I just burned it on a dual layer disk with no problems.

Having only just this minute finished burning my first dvd i am a bit dissappointed with the results.

The video quality is very good (when the camera or subject is still) otherwise it is very jerky almost stuttery. The original footage recoreded on a minidvd camera is excellant but I think the stuttering only appeared after encoding with the Panasonic DV codec.

I noticed that when i fast forward x2 the stuttering effect vanishes and the film is very smooth (though twice as fast lol)

Any ideas how to fix this?

Thanks again for all the help,
Eckie