Adobe Premier - need to combine 5 videos and cut into 4.5gb sections

- Open Premiere and create a new project using the project template that is closest to the format in which you would like to have your final output (Premiere allows you to change project settings later if required so initial project settings don't matter too much)

- DVDs also use video compliant with mpeg2 standards so your project settings should specify video size (resolution) of 720 x 576 pixels at 25 frames per second (fps) for PAL System or 720 x 480 pixels at 29.7 fps for NTSC depending on the system used in your country. Audio for both systems should be in 48 KHz.

- Import your 5 videos into the project bin (Premiere checks the video format of the clips and places only references to the actual video so it should not take too long despite the size of your clips)

- Now drag the first clip to the first video track on the timeline - Premiere automatically splits the clip into audio and video and places them correctly in the video and audio tracks.

- Scroll your timeline to the end of the first video and audio tracks (they will be of the same length) and drag your second clip to the same video and audio track beginning where the first clip ends. Close the gap between the clips completely to avoid any break in the final output.

- Repeat with the other 3 clips until you have all five clips on the timeline in the proper sequence with no gaps between them.

- Now choose File > Export Timeline to output the entire timeline to a new movie.

- You can use your project settings or you can change them if you need to change the format in which you want your combined movie.

- After you have created the new movie (the time taken depends on your hardware so it could take a few hours or much more) the duration of the combined movie that will fit on a single 4.7 GB DVD (if I am right in assuming that that is why you require 4.5 GB clips) can be arrived at easily (that will depend on the bitrate of the combined movie)

- Once you have the duration info, open the combined movie once again in premiere and render only the length that you require (instead of the entier timeline) into a separate clip. This should not take long if the temporary files created by premiere the first time around are still on your machine and no changes are made to your project or export settings.

- After creating the first clip, select the next portion of your timeline and export that to make your second clip that should fit on a 4.7 GB disk and so on.

Good Luck!

what if the original videos are all 640x480?

ok i have chosen NTSC as the output type and combined all the videos on the "video 1" timeline.
the menu is a little different from how you wrote... mine has file-->export-->movie.../audio...

i chose movie and it is exporting to avi right now, looks like it is processing them all so ill let this run.
will this mess up the aspect ratio if the original videos are 640x480?
guess ill find out later :)

i will try the duration info method for cutting them up when its done... ill letcha know how it turns out.

Thanks!

- 640 x 480 is not mpeg2 compliant video so in addition to minor distortion there will also be loss in quality (you will have to see if it is acceptable after the movie is complied).

- If you must use NTSC, choose 704 x 480 as your output resolution in Premiere to keep the distortion to the minimum (704 horizontal resolution is also acceptable as input for DVD).

- Your best option with 640 x 480 video is of course to use the PAL standard 720 x 576 which would avoid distortion.

Good Luck!

wow, i cant render them all as one video... it wants to consume about 200gb to do that and i dont have that much free.

- Size of the compiled movie depends on the compression applied.
- Please post both your project settings and export settings.

well.... i really dont want to resize them... and i also dont want to increase the size by 18x.
i think im just going to re-record the videos and manually stop them at 4gb

- Pl post your project and export settings and the software you are using to capture your video.
- Choosing the correct codec and mpeg compression settings in Premiere is the key to producing an output that is much smaller than your raw video without having to do any 'resizing'

'... it wants to consume about 200gb to do that...'

Since the total size of your original 5 videos was only 17.3 GB the final compiled movie should occupy less disk space than 17 GB unless incorrect export settings are used.

So please post the project and export settings you used.  

640x480 is just square pixel aspect vs. rectangular pixel aspect. CCIR 601 or not, or 1.0 vs 0.9.

Depending on his footage interpretation he may or may not see the clips correctly.
However he can just "stich" the MPEG2 files together w/o a video editor involved.

http://www.videohelp.com/tools/Cuttermaran

or just by concating the files together in order, they should play back no problem, whithout the need to re-encode.

avgavg: it wants 200GB of space to output RAW NTSC then to compress it into MPEG-2 again.

If you're not doing any real editing, just contact the files, then dice them up to DVD size and burn.

is there a prog for simple slicing/dicing?
everything i have wants to r-encode and inflate