Hi all, I've used this forum a lot for tips etc, but now I need to ask for some help. I've produced various project for a couple of years now but have run into a problem I just can't work out. It's been four days work just on the mastering now after many weeks of editing and I've still not been able to resolve it. I've edited and rendered videos for the project with Sony Vegas Pro 9. They are all exactly the same format etc, 16:9 PAL DVD mpegs. They all imported fine into DVD Lab Pro etc, perfect - no errors. Everythings clean as a whistle. Chapter points all green etc. I've created a menu, background PSD graphic file with text links to play the videos - very basic and functional. There are 8 videos (6 main music videos and 2 smaller extra videos). From top to bottom on the menu is; Play All (link to playlist) then Video 1 through to 8. Each video is linked to the repsective video to play from the start point of video - nothing is jumping to chapter points etc. Pretty hard to get wrong really. A quick simulation works fine with dummy videos as per the way DVD Lab Pro does it for quick testing. The total size of the project is just over 12gig and will be burnt onto Dual Layer DVD using either shrinkdvd or similar. First question, is 12gig ok for DVD Lab Pro. It doesn't complain about the size and deals with all the video when mastering, log files showing muxing etc without problems. Anyway, when I create the master folder on my hard drive and fire up to test via a couple of software DVD players I have and everything looks great, however - video 7 and 8 don't work via the menu. They highlight ok on the menu, but don't play. There doesn't seem to be any attempt to play them in fact the menu stays put with the video link highlighted. I've re-built the project from scratch and it still does the same. I've even made a project with JUST the two video's and it does work, so I know it's not the video files causing a problem. It only seems to be a problem when I create a project with all 8 videos, which kind of tells me it might be a project size related issue??? It doesn't make sense at all and is driving me crazy as I need to complete the project asap as I'm filming another now. I'm not aware of any limit in size of project in DVD Lab Pro, so it should matter that nor am I doing anything odd in the menu creation. It should work but isn't. Does anyone have any suggestions before I'm forced to drop the two videos that don't work from the project completely, which would be a really dissapointing thing to have to do...? Help! Cheers, Ed.
I've just had a look at the size of the folder DVD Lab Pro creates into and it's only 8.78gig, compared to the project size in DVD Lab Pro of 12.13gb. That seems odd as it's a big difference. Also the 6th video only plays a quarter way through and goes back to the menu. That is the premature 'end' of the DVD by the looks, hence the next two videos that follow don't play at all. There's a couple of gig of video missing from the master. Definately seems that, overall, the VOB files are being cut short somehow at 8.78gig even though the log file from DVD Lab Pro show all the video's being muxed / processed etc as the project is created to my hard drive. Anyone have any idea what's going on? I could reduce the size of all of the video's by 20% or so to get the whole thing below dual layer space, but should I have to do that prior to DVD Lab Pro work? - Before I mastered a project larger than a standard DVD and shrunk it afterwards. Granted, that was smaller than this though. If I need to do that, what should I use for the quick batch file solution but keeping high quality? I don't really want to have to re-render each video completely via Vegas as it will take a few days. Ed.
I don't use DVD Lab but Ulead, which I do use, would show that I had exceeded either DVD 5 or DVD 9 capacity and wouldn't continue I don't think. It does contain a tool to trim video (not shrink), maybe DVD Lab does too. I haven't got DVD Shrink installed but I think it would do all your DVD compliant video in reauthor mode. Just keep adding videos until you have them all. 12 G does seem like a lot to compress down to DVD 9 (7.9 G I think) but Shrink looks fine to me at around 70%, never went lower, may need two DVD 5 instead. Use ImgBurn to burn, it's free, Shrink may anyway.
