How much video time fits on a DVD?

[johnneumann]

I remember this conversation on the forum a long time ago about video times and what goes onto 4.7 gigs and different factors that use up more or less file size. I get all that.

But something's definitely wrong here.

I have a series of seven old VHS videocassettes. They're all of a series of training lectures, so they have very similar color use, rate of movement, sound, etc. It's twelve or thirteen or so hours of classroom lecture divided onto seven videos.

Yesterday, I played in tape one. From the videocassette player to the digital camcorder to the Kron. About an hour and fifty-three minutes. Broke it up into chapters (it's a whole lot of ten minute talks) and encoded it. Today, ta-da, I have a DVD that's almost two hours long. All went well.

Today, I'm working on tape two. All factors are the same except for one (I think) non-issue. One tape one, I had the audio input bumped up +5 extra points which turned out to be a little loud. On this tape, I reduced it to only +2. Other than that, everything is identical.

An hour and 50 minutes didn't want to encode. Not enough space. Took off a ten minute talk. And hour and 40 minutes don't want to encode. Same reason. Now I'm down to 82 measly minutes and the Kron still tells me there's not enough room on the partition.

By the way, the "add film" screen says 82 minutes ... size approx 65% ... and free capacity -64% !!!

Do I have some defective software here? Obviously there's a glitch in the calculation as to size versus capacity, but yesterday's project encoded even though the capacity was severely upside down.

What's going on today that a much smaller file (of basically the same project) is not encoding...?

-JOHN

[johnneumann]

Never mind, ya'll.

I solved my own problem.

I didn't realize I had to manually remove yesterday's encoded file before encoding the new one. I mistakenly assumed the Kron would have overwritten the old one.

Once I erased yesterday's project, all one hour and fifty-three minutes fit beautifully.

-JOHN

[BobC]

That was it John. We all had to learn that trick.

[jimmeeker]

Yep,

We all learned that one the hard way. But when you learn that way.....you remember it.