half my movie cuts off

[etwicky]

I'm using pinnacle 8 SE. I have a final video I've created with 33 minutes of video,transitions, music, etc. Nothing fancy. When I watch my DVD after burning it (it gives no indication that it couldn't burn the whole movie) the movie freezes up at the same point every time 18.5 minutes. I didn't put chapters in my movie so I don't know if I could use the skip or not to get over the freeze. I've read somewhere about something with a 2 gig file size limit and also a 4 gig limit. I'm totally confused. My drive is in NTSF. My dvd burner is I/Omagic. Is there a limit in windows movie maker? I could use that.

I've read you can split your movie up but how do I burn say 2 parts onto the dvd with pinnacle--It only lets you burn one. Do I use different software to burn it. I don't know how to split it besides copying it in another file and deleting the first half, then the second. Any info on any of this?

[redwudz]

Have you tried to play the individual VOBs within the VIDEO_TS folder? If they don't all play, then it may be an editing problem. Bad edits can cause that.

If you don't have them all, then maybe a authoring error. Or even if you have them all, it may be a authoring problem.

VOBs are limited to 1GB. A DVD-5 holds about 4.37GB, there shouldn't be any other size limitations.

Is your total DVD 33 minutes long? At what bitrate did you encode? Too high a bitrate can cause problems playing.

I would use another video program besides WMM, but that's just my opinion.

[etwicky]

I haven't saved my video to my hard drive except for in pinnacle. so I can't find the VOBs or Video folder. Do I need to first save the whole video in mpeg2 or is avi better. I was doing the editing, authoring and burning through pinnacle. how do I find out what bitrate I encoded it at. I didn't change any settings but what pinnacle has.

[redwudz]

Assuming it was made into a MPEG-2, that would be the format to use. You can check the bitrate with a program like MPEGProperties. I only mention high bitrate problems as a video of 33 minutes encoded to DVD size of about 4GB may have used too high of bitrate. But that's just a guess.

But check the MPEG-2 file. If it plays back OK, then you might be able to rule out editing problems.

Then you could try a different authoring program. TMPGEnc DVD Author is easy to use. For freeware, DVDAuthorgui should work. Preview it after authoring. If it's still OK, then the last two problems are burning it and media problems.

You could use Nero to burn the DVD folders or freeware, make a ISO of the DVD with ImgTools and burn with ImgBurn.

This is all just a shot in the dark. It's hard to guess what the problem is. You have to eliminate all the possibilities until you find it.