Will PE7 burn a long video to multiple DVDs?

Question

I've been working on a project that uses footage from 15 scientific conference presentations, each one lasting about an hour. The conference spanned two days, and I have two sets of footage plus literally thousands of PowerPoint slides to incorporate. I need to have scene markers set up, so the viewer will have a menu from which to select whether to "view all" or skip to a particular scene (speaker). All that is manageable.
While I know that PE7 has the "adjust quality to fit media" option when burning the video to disk, what I'd really like to do is have PE render the files with the highest quality, even if it means that the resulting video will span a number of disks. Otherwise, my DVDs will each contain at least three hours of lower quality video. I know my client will be unhappy with this.
I am separating the entire project into two sections - day one and day two.
My question is, with day one being about six hours of video, is there a way to set up the burn so that it will maintain a higher quality video? While PE can fit several hours of video on one DVD (?), it sacrifices quality to do so. I want the highest quality video possible. Incidentally, what is a reasonable length to fit on one DVD?
Do I need to break the project up into many sub-projects, or can I make the entire first day's video one project and have PE automatically break the burn into several DVDs, including scene markers?
A second question has to do with scene markers. Once I have the entire first days video set up, including scene makers, should I decide to break the project up into two or three sub-projects, is there a way to delete footage including the scene markers? Obviously I can take all the footage AFTER a certain point and delete it and then render that part to disk, but is there a way to delete the footage BEFORE a certain point, including deleting the scene markers? When I tried to do this, the scene markers remained exactly where they were - they were not tied to the actual video.
Thanks!
Jim

Answer 1

Jim,
PrE has no way to "span" multiple DVD-Videos. It also balks at really long Timelines. My advice would be to assemble your footage into Projects, each one for one disc, so you can keep the quality high.
If you already have everything in one Timeline, I'd then trim each to equal one disc, do a Save_As (Conference_Disk_01, _02, etc.) for each trimmed Project. Do the navigation for each disc, and then burn. Personally, I'd include Titles at the beginning and the end, to alert the user that they have, say Disc 1 of 6, and also "Insert Disc 2 now." That sort of thing.
PrPro has a few more capabilities, such as separate Sequences (think mini-Projects inside of a master Project), but I do the multiple disc sets the same way. Each Sequence (or groups of Sequences) is a separate disc, and is Exported for Import into Encore (my authoring program) and each disc is burned at the highest quality that will fit. Just finished a 17 disc Project, and it was handled the same way. Each Sequence was titled with the disc # and the placement on that disc, so I knew what went where. Had about 80 separate Sequences, but it was easy to know which ones went into which DVD/Encore Project. I also had the Disc X of Y on both the front of each disc, plus on the case for it. That way, the user knew where they were in the order, and could get the disc back in that order. You can do the same thing in PrE, but will be using Projects for each disc. A bit of planning will go a very long way in the production.
Good luck, and let us know if you have any more questions. BTW - for acceptable quality, I'd set a limit of 2 hours for any duration, with maybe 150 mins. as the absolute max. I've "stuffed" 3 hours on a DVD-5, but it is NOT a pretty sight. Can you go with DVD-9's?
Hunt