DVD Movie Factory 2, Large Files and Combining Clips

[maineiac]

I have downloaded the trial version of DVD Movie Factory 2 and have found it adequate for creating a VCD. Now I am trying to create a DVD. The video source is a football game (2003 Orange Bowl) which runs about 3 1/2 hours. I captured it using my Hauppauge Win TV PVR 250 on DVD long play and was able to get it to load into DVD Movie Factory...though obviously it was way too large (around 9+GB) to ever fit on a DVD. My next step was to go ahead and deal with only the first half of the game, figuring I would then create the second half on a second DVD. The first half of the game came down to about 1 1/2 hours after trimming, etc. However, since the elapsed time of the file was about 2 hours, the file size shown was about 5.1GB when I was finished. So I simply "burned" to my hard drive instead of my DVD burner. I then imported the DVD Video to Movie Factory. This gave me a file of only 3.9GB so hopefully it will burn to my DVD. However, it also created 5 different video clips which means if I decide to create a menu there will be 5 different "thumbnails" on the menu screen...which I really don't want at all. OK - here are my questions.

1. Is there any way to trim down the DVD Movie Factory project that I started with to get rid completely of the commercials that I eliminated so that the first file that I worked on will be down to the 1 1/2 hour amount representing the actual saved video parts rather than the 2+ hours which represents everything saved + all of the parts cut out?

2. Is there any way in DVD Movie Factory to either combine all of the video clips into one "file" so that I won't have to deal with five thumbnails in the menu process...or am I missing something simple in the menu process where I can simply stop the additional four thumbnails from showing on the main menu?

Thanks for any help you can give.

[4k4e4n4]

I have the same problem at times and this is when I take the video_ts file produced from MF2 and burn it in Nero....then there are no "added" chapters. Unfortunately this means having another program for burning. Hopefully Ulead can fix this bug. As far as I know there is no way to combine clips in MF2 to avoid multiple chapters/menue items. If you had a hugh hard drive you could use virtualdub.

[maineiac]

Thanks for your insight into this problem. I guess I am not surprised by the answer.....just disappointed.

[4k4e4n4]

I just found a way around your problem. Convert your video in smaller sections so it will "fit" in the MF2 DVD size limit. Then you can find the MPEG files MF2 creates in the folders....'Ulead DVD Movie Factory' then '2.0' then 'working' then 'convert'. These separate files can be merged in TMPGEnc (MPEG Tools). Then load it back as one file in MF2.
The problem I have run into in the past with merging mpeg files is AV desynchronization, but I just tested one and it came out fine. (I used the constant bitrate not variable bitrate option in MF2) I have found the quality of my MF2 encodes to be far superior than anything TMPGEnc encoded, so this is definitely worth the trouble.

[jwsons]

Sometime only because your hard drive is 32bit partition instead of NTFS (XP or Win NT partittion). Ulead productions always cut your movie into pieces only when your hard drive paertition format is 32bit. With NTFS partition it will be intact.
jwsons

[4k4e4n4]

I still get MF2 adding chapters to my projects in Win XP (NTFS)