Why So Biiiig?

[spankler]

Here is a problem (it may be several, i don't know) that I'm having:

 

Lately, when I try to burn 2 movies (say they're about 700Mb each) to a disk, after toast encodes the first, it turns into some behemoth thing of about 4.5 to 5.5Gb. The indicator at the bottom says I still have room (say 500Mb, but remember the total original size for both files is maybe a gig and a half). So after waiting 3 hours, I get a message like: "there is not enough room on this disk, 8.75 Gb are needed). Aaaaauuuugh! Besides being a spectacular waste of time, it's frustrating the pi55 out of me. Like I said, it's only been doing this lately--is there maybe a setting I effed up accidentally? Also, If one file is PAL, I'll burn it as a disk image, and then burn it to disk with another movie that is naturally coded NTSC, and the latter NTSC file weighs in at around (again) at 5 or so gigs and then won't burn to disk although it said originally that it would fit. What am I (or Toast) doing that would make a file essentially OCTUPLE in size? I have played with the video Quality (good, better, best) but that doesn't seem to have any bnoticeable efect. Pleeeeaaaase help....

[tsantee]

Video DVDs use MPEG 2 as the codec which results in file sizes much larger than the MPEG 4 that likely for your source videos. Also, your source videos may be smaller than the 720x480 resolution that Toast's MPEG 2 encoder creates.

 

There are standalone DVD players capable of playing DivX MPEG 4 video. If you have one of those you can burn your source movies using the Data window without any re-encoding needed, presuming your source files are in a format compatible with your standalone player.

 

As for the file becoming 8.75 GB, it sounds that you no longer have Automatic selected for the quality setting and Toast is using the custom settings from average and maximum bit rates. If you want to use custom encoder settings you'll need to lower those bit rate settings.

 

I don't know what to say about your experience with how the NTSC and converted PAL video sizes are different.