After several trials and tribulations, I've now been able to consistently burn DVDs to a folder and to a DVD disc with menus.

Here's some background on the input clips:

4 - MPEG-4 AVC (AVCHD) clips. All 4 together total to about 3.5GB.
A few MP3 songs used for overlay and background.

My orginal workflow had me creating one large project. I edited, split, used magic clean, etc. everything within one .PDS. After editing, I'd add the chapters I wanted. I then entered the Burn Disc process, selected the menu template I wanted and began burning. The burn process (both to folder and disc) always failed 88% through...always. If I told the burn process to burn without a menu, everything worked just fine.

Dafydd suggested an experiment which led me to the following workflow.

1. Using the individual clips, create "scene" level projects. Do all editing within the scene project.
2. Render each scene project to the file of choice. I selected the MPEG-2 1920x1080 HQ default template. Doing so allowed me to view the scene file outside of PD7 without the need for additional codecs.
3. Save all scene renderings into a "scenes" folder.
4. Repeat steps 1 - 3 until all scenes are rendered.
5. Create a "final" project and import the folder containing all of the scenes.
6. Splice all the scenes together in the desired order including any transistions as needed.
7. Make sure you save the project periodically.
8. Finally, add the chapters as desired being sure to avoid adding a chapter where two scenes have been spliced togther with or without a transition. Place the chapter marker a few frames before or after the beginning/end of the splice/transition.
9. Enter the burn process and select the menu template you desire.
10. Reauthor the menu template as needed.
11. Save the "final" project before continuing with the burn.
12. Now burn the project to a folder or to disc.
13. It worked!! At least it worked for me.

I was able to do this technique 3 times in a row without failure.

I also did this without killing any background processes within WINXP and without uninstalling any other software.

To prove to myself nothing else on the PC changed, I went back to my oringial large project and tried the burn. It failed at the ususal 88%.

The only conclusion I can draw, is that there is too much going on within one large project for PD7. For some reason, it prefers (works better) when performing smaller units of work.

I did run into a problem with the magic clean features, color and shake. Any magic clean feature I selected added significant noise (artifacts, motion blur, etc) to the rendered scene. This will be posted under another topic.

I hope others will find this workflow useful and will ultimately have success with this software.

Many thanks to Dafydd for the help!! Regards,

Mark H.