Available Disk Space For Burning DVD's

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Level 4

1,660 points

Available Disk Space For Burning DVD's

Hi

I'm just learning how to use iMovie and iDVD so you'll have to excuse me is this is an obvious question but I seem to be having a weird issue with the available disk space for burning a DVD. I created my DVD movie with iMovie and saved the 35GB file to my 200GB external firewire drive. Combined with the other stuff on that drive I have 40GB of free space left. As well I have 22GB of free hard drive space on my Mini's 40GB drive. Now when I try to burn the DVD I get a popup message telling me that there is insufficient disk space to burn the DVD. Which disk space is it referring to, my Mini's drive or my external drive? From all the info I've read I thought that all I need was double the DVD space on the startup disk, or about 10GB to burn a DVD. Is this correct? If so, why would it continue to say it's out of disk space?

Cheers
Djon

1.25Ghz Mini 1GB Ram, 233Mhz iMac, Mac OS X (10.3.9)

Posted on Dec 22, 2005 5:44 PM

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Answer 1

Dec 22, 2005 6:29 PM in response to djon

22GB of space on the internal drive should be sufficient. The error messages usually apply to the startup drive.

I would try repairing permissions, delete the iDVD preferences file (com.apple.iDVD.plist) and try again. You will have to "open" your iDVD project after deleting the plist file, as iDVD will forget where it is located.

How much free space is needed? Apple's guidance says 2X the DVD size, or about 10GB. I don't think this is sufficient, as your system still needs swap space and room to breathe. You will see other advice about keeping 10% or so of any drive available at all times, which would be in addition to the 10GB. So, add this to the 10GB, and you are up to 15 GB or so. I always keep 20GB free to stay on the safe side, so your 22GB should still be plenty.

John

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Answer 2

F Shippey

Level 7

21,500 points

Dec 22, 2005 8:33 PM in response to djon

I created my DVD movie with iMovie and saved the 35GB file to my 200GB external firewire drive. Combined with the other stuff on that drive I have 40GB of free space left. As well I have 22GB of free hard drive space on my Mini's 40GB drive. Now when I try to burn the DVD I get a popup message telling me that there is insufficient disk space to burn the DVD. Which disk space is it referring to, my Mini's drive or my external drive?

35GB of DV movie content would be close to a three hour movie. (DV Stream runs about 13 GB per hour.) It may be telling you you don't have enough space on a DVD disc.

When compressed by iDVD that amount of content would fit on a DL disc, if you have an internal DL burner, but is about an hour (13 GB) too much to fit on a single layer disc.

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Answer 3

djon Author

Level 4

1,660 points

Dec 22, 2005 8:35 PM in response to John Beatty1

John

I repaired permissions and deleted the iDVD pref's but no luck. Then I moved about 4GB worth of music files from my startup drive to my old Bondi iMac and I'm now trying to burn the DVD and so far I haven't gotten the error message yet. Before I got the message right away but it's now been about 40 minutes into encoding and so far so good. So maybe it just needed a bit more space on the startup drive. It seems incredable that it would require that much free space. If so, I may need to re-think my set-up. Moving my system to the firewire drive and using the Mini's drive as backup may work out better.

Thanks for your help.
Djon

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Answer 4

djon Author

Level 4

1,660 points

Dec 22, 2005 8:45 PM in response to F Shippey

Actually, it's 110 minutes of video. Acording to iDVD it works out to 3.8GB of video which should fit on a 4.7GB DVD. I just moved a bit more stuff off my startup disk and it seems to be working this time. It's 40 minutes into encoding and it hasn't sent up that error yet. Wish me luck.

Djon

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Answer 5

Dec 23, 2005 12:24 AM in response to djon

please help?? How do you get a 20 gig or so DV film onto a 4.7 gig disc? When I convert my film to Quicktime it will fit but looks atrocious! Is there some way I can save my film as a DV or some higher quality format? I don't get it ? So you don't have to make sure that hte original file is less than 4.7 gig? please help me out if ou can!

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Answer 6

Dec 23, 2005 3:55 AM in response to Community User

How do you get a 20 gig or so DV film onto a 4.7 gig disc?

That's what iDVD is for! It uses MPEG2 compression, and will squeeze up to two hours of DV (about 24GB of DV) onto a standard DVD-R. So leave it as a DV file and let iDVD do it's work. Yes there will be some compression losses, but it will look pretty good.

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Answer 7

djon Author

Level 4

1,660 points

Dec 23, 2005 8:56 PM in response to Community User

Subtlefly2

I think the trick is not to create a quicktime movie from your video but to create a DV video using iMovie. After you assemble your video using iMovie you then export it to iDVD which compresses it into a 4.7GB DVD. Give it a try and you'll see that you get much better results than with Quicktime.

Cheers
Djon

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Answer 8

djon Author

Level 4

1,660 points

Dec 23, 2005 9:00 PM in response to John Beatty1

John

Just to let you know, moving that extra 4GB off my startup disk seems to have done the trick. I have made 2 other DVD's since yesterday and everything has worked fine. Encoding takes forever but the resulting DVD turns out pretty good.

Djon

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