Exporting 2 hours of video

Hi and welcome to the forum!

If you're planning to burn a DVD, you should export as a Quicktime Movie (NOT using Quicktime Conversion). Unchecking the box to make it self-contained should save both time and space.

For iDVD, the size of the file is not an issue - only length. Up to two hours can be burned onto a normal disc in iDVD, and four hours on a double-layer DVD. You're probably cutting it close for a single layer one. Make sure you have "Professional Quality" selected in the iDVD preferences.

iDVD does the compression to make it fit the disc. If it really is two hours you are at the very limit of what the DVD can hold. You will have to use the simplest menu or no menu at all to keep it down to size.

Yes, that's correct.

In the future, you can save a lot of time & disk space when you export to QuickTime Movie, if you UNCHECK the option called +"Make Movie Self-Contained".+ This creates what is called a QT reference movie; import/drag it into iDVD and you are on your way without having to create that 22GB file.

One other note: before exporting your project from FCE it is always a good idea to do both of the following:

+Sequence > Render All > Both+ and
+Sequence > Render Only > Mixdown+

There is something wrong if your exported Reference file is 22 gig.
Can you step by step your procedure please?

Al

Something's not right there.

An excessively large reference movie can happen if you have not rendered everything before exporting. Go back and do the two rendering actions that I suggested in my earlier message. Then try exporting to QT Movie again (be sure to uncheck the +Make Movie Self Contained+ option).

The other thought that occurs is this - please check your sequence settings & clip properties. You can get this info by control-clicking the name of the sequence (or clip) in the FCE Browser and then selecting Item Properties. Let us know what it says for +compression, fps and frame size+ - both your sequence and one or more of your clips.

It will also help if you identify the exact make & model camcorder you used.

Yes, it will help us figure out what's going on to know the model Canon camcorder you used. Did you Log & Transfer all the clips yourself from both of these two camcorders?

Things just don't sound right. Rendering should not take 9 hours if your clip & sequence settings match. Unless you added lots of effects that require rendering, and even then 9 hours sounds way too long.

What model Mac are you using, how much RAM does it have, what is the size & amount of free space on your hard drive? What version of FCE are you using?

You are effectively out of disk space. It's an underlying problem that is at least contributing to the issues you are experiencing. The fact that your Freeagent Go drive is USB2 (not FireWire) is also a contributing factor.

I know that 25.3GB and 70GB sound like a lot of space. But 23.5GB on your system drive is the +bare minimum+ I would recommend anyone have on their system drive at any time. Both FCE and OS X need disk space to run and perform their tasks including exporting from FCE. All computers slow down as the system HD fills up, until it gets to the point they just won't run at all. You are approaching that point.

I'd recommend freeing up at least an additional 25GB (for a minimum of 50GB free space) on your system HD before doing anything else. It will at least reduce, and perhaps even correct, the problems you are having exporting.