Splitting Dvd's While Burning

[Dan K]

I am using Easy CD and DVD Burning (Red Box) for the first time. I am converting old MiniDV tapes to DVD for archiving and DVD viewing. I captured using Windows MovieMaker. Since I have Vista Home Basic I don't have burning capability within WMM, so I bought the Roxio product. If I publish a captured video with WMM and it is long (much longer than a DVD can hold), I expected that when I went tio burn the DVD using Roxio, that it would stop when the DVD was full, and prompt me to put in another blank DVD. It does not do this. The "Fit to Disc" checkbox in DVDExpress doesn't seem to work if the fle is too large. This is after waiting 1 hour to publish the video file in WMM. Am I missing something???

Thx

Dan

[tbrewst]

Burn the project to an iso file first then double click the iso and let Disc Copier fit it to the disc.

[Jim_Hardin]

No Disc Copier in the Red Box…

 

Dan never said how long his projects are???

 

A DVD holds 1 hour at Highest Quality, and the EP setting in Express seems to allow about 3 hours.

 

Anyone want to guess how poor the quality will be if that much is packed onto a DVD!

 

I am guessing that the miniDV tapes you have only hold 1 hour? And DVD's only hold 1 hour. You starting to see a picture.

 

[lynn98109]

<snip>

Am I missing something???

Thx

Dan

A data disc may split a long file (it's called disc spanning, and frequently leads to desperate posts about how to recover the data), but a Video DVD (the kind playable in a DVD player) is a very specific type of encoding. It is possible to have reduced quality to fit, but it doesn't just split part of the file off.

 

Lynn

[bimicher]

I am using Easy CD and DVD Burning (Red Box) for the first time. I am converting old MiniDV tapes to DVD for archiving and DVD viewing. I captured using Windows MovieMaker. Since I have Vista Home Basic I don't have burning capability within WMM, so I bought the Roxio product. If I publish a captured video with WMM and it is long (much longer than a DVD can hold), I expected that when I went tio burn the DVD using Roxio, that it would stop when the DVD was full, and prompt me to put in another blank DVD. It does not do this. The "Fit to Disc" checkbox in DVDExpress doesn't seem to work if the fle is too large. This is after waiting 1 hour to publish the video file in WMM. Am I missing something???

Thx

Dan

 

Archiving you video files to a DVD and creating a video DVD are completely different operations and require completely different programs. Which do you want to do first so that we can concentrate on one task at a time?

[Dan K]

Thx to everyone for your comments.

Jim - I am not converting each tape in it's entirety. Some DVDs will be only part of a tape, but others may span more than one tape. So one of the longer files was 18GB in size as an AVI file after WMM published it. I selected the Fit to DVD box when I burned the DVD using Roxio. The DVD video quality was acceptable for my purposes. Going forward, if I have other content for which I want the highest possible DVD quality, how do I go about deciding how long the video clips should be? Is the 1 hour rule technically correct, or a rule of thumb based on everyone's experience?

 

Lynn - I am wondering how large the AVI must get to before Roxio refuses to burn it on to a DVD. I understand the quality will suffer with too much compression, but does anyone know what the Roxio cutoff is?

 

As I am just getting into this, I realized on my first DVD that Roxio doesn't create chapters so I need to fast forward to get to the next chapter when viewing. I guess the sticks and rocks approach could be to create a separate AVI file using WMM for each chapter. Then select Add more Video Files when using Roxio. There must be a more elegant solution, I assume within WMM when the AVI file is created using WMM's "publish" function. Can someone tell me what that is?

 

Thx again everyone, and Happy Holidays.

Dan

[Dan K]

Archiving you video files to a DVD and creating a video DVD are completely different operations and require completely different programs. Which do you want to do first so that we can concentrate on one task at a time?

 

Walt,

WRT archiving video files on a DVD, I assume that is not possible since many of my files are more than one DVD can hold. For example, my last post used an example of an AVI file that was 18 GB. I assume I need to archive on an external HDD.

Thx,

Dan

[bimicher]

Thx to everyone for your comments.

Jim - I am not converting each tape in it's entirety. Some DVDs will be only part of a tape, but others may span more than one tape. So one of the longer files was 18GB in size as an AVI file after WMM published it. I selected the Fit to DVD box when I burned the DVD using Roxio. The DVD video quality was acceptable for my purposes. Going forward, if I have other content for which I want the highest possible DVD quality, how do I go about deciding how long the video clips should be? Is the 1 hour rule technically correct, or a rule of thumb based on everyone's experience?

 

Lynn - I am wondering how large the AVI must get to before Roxio refuses to burn it on to a DVD. I understand the quality will suffer with too much compression, but does anyone know what the Roxio cutoff is?

 

As I am just getting into this, I realized on my first DVD that Roxio doesn't create chapters so I need to fast forward to get to the next chapter when viewing. I guess the sticks and rocks approach could be to create a separate AVI file using WMM for each chapter. Then select Add more Video Files when using Roxio. There must be a more elegant solution, I assume within WMM when the AVI file is created using WMM's "publish" function. Can someone tell me what that is?

 

Thx again everyone, and Happy Holidays.

Dan

 

1 hour of video at best quality for 1 DVD is industry standard. Forget about file sizes when working with video.

You have a "cut-down" version of EMC 9 and it has not all features. Roxio can create chapters without problems when you are in myDVD. Or are you talking about Titles ( separate movies which can be selected from the menu page)?

BTW, why are you bothering with WMM?

Actually you might be better of capturing in short 10-15 minute clips. THey are much easier to work with

[Dan K]

1 hour of video at best quality for 1 DVD is industry standard. Forget about file sizes when working with video.

You have a "cut-down" version of EMC 9 and it has not all features. Roxio can create chapters without problems when you are in myDVD. Or are you talking about Titles ( separate movies which can be selected from the menu page)?

BTW, why are you bothering with WMM?

Actually you might be better of capturing in short 10-15 minute clips. THey are much easier to work with

Walt,

I am using WMM because it came with the PC, and I don't have enough scars yet to realize it is crap.

The Roxio S/W I have includes MyDVD Express, not MyDVD. Is Express the cut-down version, because I don't see where I can include chapters.

Although I am new to this and may be screwing up the semantics, I believe I mean chapters and not titles. What I want is to be able to hit play on the DVD player and watch the whole movie, but jump ahead by hitting the advance chapter button on the remote.

When you suggest capturing in short clips, I assume you mean something like the following example. My tape contains 3 "scenes" let's say the first is my daughter's school play, the second is her hanging ornaments on the XMAS tree and the third is her opening presents on XMAS morning. Now I capture the entire tape. You're suggesting capturing the first scene, hitting STOP when the play ends and saving that first scene (or chapter or clip). So I have 3 separate files right from the start. If that's what you mean it makes sense to me. BTW, what S/W do you recommend instead of WMM?

Thx,

Dan

[bimicher]

Walt,

I am using WMM because it came with the PC, and I don't have enough scars yet to realize it is crap.

The Roxio S/W I have includes MyDVD Express, not MyDVD. Is Express the cut-down version, because I don't see where I can include chapters.

Although I am new to this and may be screwing up the semantics, I believe I mean chapters and not titles. What I want is to be able to hit play on the DVD player and watch the whole movie, but jump ahead by hitting the advance chapter button on the remote.

When you suggest capturing in short clips, I assume you mean something like the following example. My tape contains 3 "scenes" let's say the first is my daughter's school play, the second is her hanging ornaments on the XMAS tree and the third is her opening presents on XMAS morning. Now I capture the entire tape. You're suggesting capturing the first scene, hitting STOP when the play ends and saving that first scene (or chapter or clip). So I have 3 separate files right from the start. If that's what you mean it makes sense to me. BTW, what S/W do you recommend instead of WMM?

Thx,

Dan

 

Since you are posting in this forum, I am assuming you have the Easy CD ..."Red Box" ... version. I believe that is a cut-down version of the full, Vista compatible EMC 9 suite and it may well be missing myDVD.

You have the correct idea about titles and chapters. myDVD does create chapters for a title.

You also have the right idea about capturing in short clips. If you want you could archive those short clips to a DVD.

For capturing from digital camcorder tape I use a small, free utility called WinDV which captures from tape to files based on the timestamp. I don't know if it works with Vista