Arch media - not enough room?!?!?
 

I have a three hour video that I used Mark Bitrate calc. for - it rendered out to 4 gig nicely. I import the media and try and prepare it and it says it will take 11 gigs disc!?? Why is it saying this? The media is only 3.99 gigs and the audio is 300mb - this is less then the 4.7 that is on the DVD? I haven't seen this before. The video is rendered out mpg2 - the usual way I render for everything else.

That's just DVD Architect being it's usual idiot self :-(
This app has a long history of incorrectly reporting file sizes.
Odds are that if you ignore the warning, it'll do the prepare/burn as expected with no problems.

yeah I get that every once in a while also. Dumb DVDA, however when that happens I haven't saved the project in DVDA yet cause as soon as you drop the mpg/ac3 in, it goes nuts right? So nothing saved nothing lost, close DVDA and reopen bring it in again it should be OK, sometimes I think it does it just to piss us off.

I tried turning the computer off and on, no luck. I will try a prepare and see what happens then.
UPDATE - it told me I had to OPTIMIZE the files to work - why? Doing it now, not sure about what the quality if going to be like...

Here is the reason:

Once you open DVD Architect, the project's overall video bitrate defaults to 8 Mbps. This will result in a calculated media size that's far larger than your actual video content warrants due to the length of your video. However, that three-hour video rendered to only 4GB will result in an actual overall bitrate of only about 3 Mbps. Now this might produce acceptable image quality for some uses - but to those people who are used to high-definition content on a big screen, such a bitrate is too low even for standard definition.

If you don't change any settings and create the disc content anyway, only the menus will be at 8 Mbps while the actual video content will remain at your media's actual overall bitrate. This is due to DVD Architect smart-rendering your low-bitrate MPEG-2 content. The only time that DVD Architect will recompress your video is if the original media's overall bitrate significantly exceeds the maximum supported bitrate for DVD-Video or your project's selected bitrate, whichever figure is less.

On the other hand, DVD Architect is now telling you to "optimize" the project before it can render. This is most likely because your rendered MPEG-2 file is not compliant with the DVD-Video standard (in my experience, DVD Architect expects an MPEG-2 file of exactly 720x480 resolution at 59.94 interlaced fields per second and an overall video bitrate of at least 4 Mbps but no more than 8 Mbps), and thus must be recompressed. It's either because the source bitrate is too low, or your video is inadvertently rendered at 30p rather than 60i. (The only DVD compliant framerate in DVD Architect is 59.94i, or 29.97 fps interlaced, for NTSC - and that 59.94i may consist of native 59.94i video or telecined 23.976p encapsulated in a 59.94i stream.)