Incorrect Dvd Size

[ejstubbs]

Quite often when I'm burning a video to Toast, it will tell me that there is not enough room on the blank DVD. So I follow the standard advice, which is to burn to disc image and then use disc compression to fit it on to a DVD. However, on a number of occasions I've found that the disc image is well under 4GB, so needs no compression to be copied to a DVD.

 

There are two main reasons why this is a little irking:

1) It means that burning to DVD requires an unnecessary extra step.

2) The copied DVD gets a title in all upper case, with underscores between the words rather than spaces.

 

Why does Toast think that the video is going to need more room that it actually does?

[tsantee]

I can only speculate about why this happened with your specific videos. The MPEG encoding by Toast is a variable bit rate which means that some scenes can have a lower bit rate than others. Scenes that have little movement do not require as great a bit rate to attain high quality as do ones that have a lot of motion. Also, if the source video is letterboxed with black bars on top and bottom, there is less content that needs the higher-bit encoding. Of course, Toast doesn't know what the content of the video will be when it estimates how much space will be required. It also needs to make a conservative estimate or a lot of users would get angry when the end of encoding was reached and Toast reported there isn't enough room on the disc.

 

Personally I always choose Save as Disc Image when Toast is going to be encoding the video and then burn from that image file. The reason is that I can check the resulting disc image by mounting and playing it with DVD Player and I don't need to worry about having to start over from the beginning if something goes wrong during disc burning.

 

The DVD's video title isn't changed, just the file name that appears in the Finder. Your menu still shows the DVD's title as you entered it.