What is the deal with Pinnacle Studio 8 and menus!

[dredle1]

Hi folks,

I swear I'm going nuts here. I've been using Studio 8 for about 3 years to convert my captured video into dvds. Originally when I started out, I only had about 30 minutes of film on the disks. Now I do try to fill them up to the 1 hour max. I have always used transitions, titles, and menus. However, my latest project is 59 minutes. I loaded it with transitions and a menu with 6 chapter points. On the make disk settings I choose best quality and burn directly to disk. After rendering, I get the error "failed to compile movie". The only reason for the error that I can find is in the muxerlog text which states "failed to open the dvd\video_ts\temp.vob. So, I took out all the transitions and the menu and it burned it just fine. I am not doing anything different at all then what I've done in the past, except for the fact that the project is longer. Is this the Studio 8 curse! I really enjoy having chapter points instead of fast forwarding through the entire dvd to get to the end. Does anyone have any suggetions or solutions I could test? I would appreciate it. Thanks.

[InXess]

Try checking Pinnacle's (Studio) forum. Consider reinstalling Studio and/or Hollywood FX. Looks like either corruption of your installation or you exceeded the file size limit that Studio could fit on a DVD. If possible try creating a DVD to the HDD folder(without burning). If it worked for 3 years it surely is capable of handling the project unless there was something unusual about it.

[Deaf Raiders]

I had this problem with my Pinnacle Studio Plus 10 and it seems the only way to solve it is uninstall and reinstall it worked for me. And thats what the Pinnacle Studio people told me to do. I would prefer to you if u create disc content and not burn to disc yet this saves DVD, CD-R disc. And then burn disc content after all the rendering and so

[edDV]

First thing I would check is hard disk space on your temp file disk. Studio 8 needs something like 18+GB space to process a 4.35GB DVDR and is poor at deleting temp files until the end. If hard disk space or memory is tight, you might try redering to an MPeg2 or Image file as an intermediate step and then continue. I recall doing this on a limited laptop.

[dredle1]

Thank you all for your replys. I did run a test earlier just to see what happened. As I stated before, my project is almost 59 min long and has a menu with 6 chapter points. I trimmed the clips so I had about a 3 min movie, but I kept the menu and same 6 chapter points. The movie rendered fine and stored the image on the hard drive. So I guess that shows that the menu was OK but maybe my project was just too long to run it on best quality with is 8000/kb. Maybe if I choose custom and dropped it to 7000/kb it would be OK. I'm going to try to trim a bit more of the clips and run it again and see what I get. I'll post my results either way in case it will help anyone else if it works.

[InXess]

Trim few min. from your movie and render as, say, 56 min. total project time. That should do the trick. Pinnacle, although quite elaborate, is not a very sophisticated software to verify all your project properties ahead of time, that is why it fails at the last - compilation stage.
Also, different media as well as recorders may give different indication as to total space available (which may slightly vary from software default). Happened to me with DVD2One - i had to custom set a bit lower DVD-R final disk capacity for project to go through, default was appearing to be too big.

[dredle1]

OK, I trimmed my movie to 50 mins, down from 59 mins. I also changed the to quality to 7000/kb instead of full quality at 8000/kb. Rendering still fine, and it actually compiled for a bit longer before it failed. However, it only had 749.2 mb left to process from 7384.4 mb total size. So, I guess I still need to trim some more. Looking at the auxillary files, I know that the problem lies in the "temp" file under the "video_ts" folder. Everytime that it has failed to compile, the "temp" file is always empty. On the smaller movies that I tested the "temp" file is always replaced by an "anchor" file, and a bunch more. I will try again to trim and post back to let everyone know.

[dredle1]

I thought I had it figured out folks. I have an 80 gb external hard drive, and all I use it for is my pinnancle stuff and movie backups. However, once I'm done with a project I delete it, so I've always got about 70 gb free space. I hadn't defragmented the drive in a very long time and boy did it need it. I thought for sure that would do the trick. So again, I loaded up my project which is about 49 mins with a 6 chapter menu and the size is about 8115 kb on full quality 8000 kb. I should tell you that the original 59 min version without the menu that I was able to burn is about 5608 kb. So maybe the menu jumps the size up too much to an unworkable level. When I did my 5 min tests with the menu but trimmed the clips way back just to test, it worked just fine, but it was a very small file size then. I will try it again with a lower bit rate, like say 6000 or 7000 and see what happens. If it doesn't work again, I think I'll flush my head down the toilet.

[dredle1]

OK, I ran it again at a bit rate of 5000 which gave me a file size of 5562 mb, which was under the movie of 5608 mb that I did burn without a menu. I still got "failed to compile disk" error and the temp file under the video_ts folder is empty. For the love of God, I do not understand what the heck is going on here. Does anyone have any idea or suggestions I can try?

[InXess]

Have you tried searching Pinnacle forum? This would be the best place (moderated by developers, OK maybe not... but close enough) to do your search. They also have LiveChat with Support guys. Can't imagine you haven't done that yet...