Newbie desperate for help!

[gmill]

I’m new to Premiere Elements (previous experience was with Roxio 7.5) and have a few questions.
This is my first project, and I was very ambitious and captured all 4 hours of old home movies from a VHS tape into project “A”. I was about midway through the editing process, when I became concerned that the project was too large, (especially since I plan on adding music to the background). I decided to divide the project into 2 portions. I did this by saving the project under a new name (project “B”). I then deleted the appropriate clips from both “A” and “B”, so as not to have duplicate clips on each. I am now ready to add the music and then burn to DVD and I have some questions.
1) How do I know if ALL, or only PART of my project will fit on one DVD? (Roxio had a bar to indicate how much room was available.) 2) Depending on space available, and if necessary, can I move portions of project “A” to “B” (without losing all of my editing) or vice versa? If this is possible, how would I go about it? (I’ve tried, but was unsuccessful.)
Please help, I'd hate to have done all this work and then have to loose part of it because I can't combine the two.
Thanks in advance.

[FutureDirt]

1) Premiere Elements will try to fit the project to a single DVD. It does this by lowering the encoded bitrate as the project gets longer. As a general rule of thumb, you should be able to fit up to 2 hours of video on a standard single-sided DVD.

2) There is not quick and simple way to combine 2 projects, but there is a way. What I would recommend is to take the portion you wish to move and export only that as a DV-AVI. Then you can import this freshly created DV-AVI into the target project. You leave both projects in tact and lose none of your editing. The drawback here is that the DV-AVI will be a single video file and you will not have your individual clips for editing when you bring it into the target project.

You have defintely hit on some features that it would be nice to see in future versions of Premiere Elements. My suggestion to you is if you truely believe these should be implemented, you should send a feature request to Adobe. This can be done here:
http://www.adobe.com/support/feature.html

[gmill]

Thanks so much for your help. I am so relieved that I won't loose all my editing. Just to clarify; when I export as a DV-AVI, I will be exporting to my hard drive, and not a DVD?
I've learned a valuable lesson here. I have 3 more VHS tapes that I want to put on DVD, and I know now, that I need to capture the video in smaller clips (instead of 2 - 3 very large clips) and keep it under 2 hours.
Thanks again for helping me out!
Best Regards,

[FutureDirt]

For your clarification, yes, you will be exporting to your hard drive and not to a DVD.

It sounds like you are well on your way. Let us know if you have any other questions.