[targetdummy]

OK, I've decided to put the last 10 years of holiday videos onto DVD. I have pinnacle studio 9 plus which is great at importing footage either from my analoge camcorder or from a video player using firewire connections. So I now have lots of big AVI files on my 300Gb Maxtor USB2 external drive and not one dropped frame in sight. So far so good....

I want to put up to 3 hours of footage onto 1 dual layer DVD (8.5 Gb) using my new Sony DVD writer and have tried to use the Pinnacle software to do this. Oh dear...pinnacle will not render the AVI to MPEG2 under any circumstances. It simply keeps crashing the PC after anything from 2 to 5 hours of rendering.

I can't spend my whole life trying to get it to work, so I've also tried NERO 6 and had similar problems.

Is there a product out there that can cope with rendering about 35Gb of AVI into an MPEG2 file that will fit onto an 8.5GB dual layer DVD?

Ideally, I would like the same product to do both the rendering and burning.

The PC I am using has a 2.2Mhz processor with 1 Gb of memory and is runing XP Pro with SP2.

Thanks in advance for any help/advice you can give.

[MarkE19]

What else is running on the PC? Antivirus, firewall, screensaver etc etc should all be stopped, along with any power save modes. The easiest way to stop all the unwanted background programs is EndItAll2 that I have sent to a few users on this forum and has solved many of their problems. Do a search for it or PM me your e-mail address and I'll pass it on.
ATM I would suggest you only create single layer DVD's as dual layer is still very new & expensive to buy. Also they are not widely compatable with standalone DVD players.
3 hours onto a single layer (4.7Gb) DVD is probably going to be ok depending on the quality of the origional footage. 1 -2 hours per SL DVD is fairly common without too much quality loss, so try editing into smaller chunks to see what you get. Pinnacle should be fine with SL DVD authoring, but I'm not sure if it is even capable of DL DVD authoring (as I've never used it!). Perhaps this is the problem. Also Pinnacle Studio is well known for being unstable, so make sure you have all the latest updates from their web site.

Mark.

[targetdummy]

Thanks for your help Mark. I got a copy of Enditall and tried again after shutting down everything (AVG, Zonealarm, internet connection and a whole host of other stuff). What I get now on a regular basis is the PC resetting due to a memory leak after about 2-3 hours of rendering (about 1 hour of 'real' footage).

I have looked on various forums, including Pinnacles, and this does seem to be a problem. Anyone know of any fixes?

For info, Pinnacle claims to support DL DVDs and it says I can get 3 hours of footage on one at 76% quality. I dont know what this would look like played through a normal DVD player, but it would be nice to have the chance to check it out if Pinnacle would actually render the original footage!!

[melliott1963]

I hate to say this, but your best 'fix' is to dump Pinnacle and purchase something that is far more stable such as Ulead Video Studio or Sony Vegas Movie Studio, or you could really splash out and go for something like Adobe Premier or Sony Vegas.

Alternatively, assuming you've been able to save your edited footage as an AVI file, you could use TMPEnc to encode to MPEG2. Look here: http://www.tmpg-inc.com/

I would have thought that 3 hours on a DL DVD should look fine - I've got 1½ hour footage on a single layer DVD using 2 pass variable bit rate to encode it and it looks good.

[senu]

I have used Pinnacle since v7 and have to say 9+ is its most stable version it does have a recent update patch but in general does not live well with many other programs.
I generally create multi boot systems and put video editing programs on fairly clean windows installations so I Very rarely get the problems you experience. I hate to have to agree with melliot1963.Pinnacles "bad" name is unfortunately deserved ( even though i seem lucky with it . Its hit or miss behaviour is to be polite annoying. Keep your Pinnacle by all means but perhaps Adobe Premiere Elements ( a tad less user friendly to use but oh so stable and very affordable )is one way to go. It also authors dvds
http://www.adobe.co.uk/products/tryadobe/main.html
Adobe has such a following that if you have any problems with it somebody has probably been there before you and there is a fix

On a more general note ,Dual layer dvds are great for data storage and theoretically for large amounts of video but at present the inconsistencies in results for video are ( to me) somewhat worrisome and perhaps 2 single layer discs may be an easy escape route for you
good luck

I've used Adobe Premier at work for the last 5 years and can tell you
that Premier Pro 1.5 is superb and very very stable...
Even Adobe Encore has not let me down creating DVD's.

Why don't you cut your project up into chunks and just work with more timelines in your DVD project?

I agree with the previous contributors about Pinnacle studio. I've used versions 8 and 9 and they were very unstable usually crashing at some stage along the line. The patches that Pinnacle offer are even worse and it's record of offering help is abysmal in my opinion. I would also suggest Adobe Premiere Elements or if you want to push the boat out the the pro version. You would be better off with two internal hard disks instead of using the external one you have now. It also helps if the FSB or Front Side Bus is pushing near 800mhz. This means getting work done in hours rather than days.