Is there a file size limit on video that can be processed by editing tools?

[TDaveJ]

I edited the the NTSC movie, Tin Man, which is a made-for-TV series of three 90 minute episodes, into a single title so it could be shown seamlessly end-to-end without changing disks. Doing this at the original file size resulted a DVD video structure with a single VTS containing a single TTN of about 10.3 Gb. When I ran FixVTS from the tools menu of PGCEdit, it ran Ok up to Cell 3 of the third episode and then referenced the remaining 6 cells to that cell, effectively truncating the film at that point at about 8.5 Gb in size. Similarly, after rebuilding the movie as abve, I used PGCEdit to delete the last cell, which was a blanked cell. PGCEdit did that, and then I had it redo the time map for the title. During that process, when it came to the same cell, it said that the ending sector number was less than the beginning sector number and that it couldn't continue.

Suspecting some form of limit, I ran a combination of episodes 1 and 2, which was now in a single VTS containing 1 TTN of about 8 Gb, through DVD Shrink reducing size by about 15%. I then added episode 3 as before giving a file size of about 9.3 Gb. This time the errors repeated, but at cell 7 of episode 3, which was, again, at about the 8.5 Gb point. Repeating the build process again, this time I shrank the episode 1-2 segment and the episode 3 segment by 20 % each prior to joining them, resulting in a joined file size of about 8.6 Gb.

This time everything worked Ok. Processing that build through DVD Shrink indicated that it needed to be shrunk about 5% more to fit on a dual layer disk. The Audio track was about 850 Mb in size. When the menus were added back in, it needed to be shrunk about 10 % to fit. Note that DVD Shrink would not open the file sets that generated errors in the other programs.

Trying to fix something like this would probably be unproductive because it doesn't come up very often and it apparantly affects several applications. It also has a very simple work-around. I am more interested in knowing what the limit is for planning purposes. I am running the software mentioned above on WXp(x64) on a dual core Intel machine with 4 Gb memory.

[r0lZ]

Each VTS must be made of maximum 9 VOB files (not including the menu VOB), and each VOB file must be LESS (not less or equal!) than 1GB. So, the total for a title in a single VTS is less than 9GB, but the exact limit depends of the cut points made by the authoring program. Theoretically, the cut point can be just one sector (2048 bytes) before the 1GB limit. So, the theoretical limit is 9GB minus 18KB, but many authoring programs cut the VOB files just before a nav pack (this is a good practice imo), and since the position of the nav packs is not easily predictable, you cannot know for sure what will be the limit for a particular DVD.

Note that some programs can handle more or larger VOB files, but this is out of specs. PgcEdit, like most programs, ignores the VOB files greater than VTS_**_9.VOB.

You need also to reserve some free space on a DL-DVD for the layer break. If the DVD is completely full, it will be almost impossible to place the layer break at the beginning of a cell, as imposed by the standard.

[TDaveJ]

Thank-you for the reply. That explains a lot. I was unaware of both limits.

For info, I was real lucky on the layer break in that, even with only 25 cells, one of them fell exactly where it needed to be to fill the DL disk to 99.6% without cutting a cell.

[blutach]

Some transcoding programs are able to shrink projects where VOBs are greater than 1Gb. BUt the rules still stand - only 9 VOBs (excl the menu). SO, you can make _9.VOB bigger and let the transcoder work it down to dual layer size.

Regards