Speeding up DVD file generation after capture

[trents]

I'm wanting to know how I can improve the DVD file generation between capture and DVD disc burn. This seems to be a disc intensive operation rather than a CPU intensive operation. CPU usage meter shows low usage but the LED hard drive activity indicator on my case panel is blinking rapidly the whole time.

I have a Phemom X3 running at 3.0 ghz, 4gb of ram, Windows 7 32-bit OS, and a single SATA hard disk. Using MediaNow editing/burning software which seems to be a stripped down version of PowerProducer.

Specifically, would purchasing another hard disk and running the hardrives in a striped RAID configuration speed this process up much?

Thanks for your help.

[hech54]

Huh?

[johns0]

Are you saying that authoring the dvd is too slow for you?Takes me about 6 minutes to author a 4.37 dvd folder.A faster hdd wont help in that case.

[guns1inger]

If you are capturing to a DVD compliant format then authoring should be pretty quick - 5 - 10 minutes in most cases, depending on the complexity of the menu design and the number of titles.

If, however, you did not capture it in a DVD compliant format, the video will be re-encoded before being authored, and this will take some time. Encoding is CPU intensive, and while you might make an small incremental improvement adding a new drive, upgrading your CPU to something much faster and with more cores will make a huge difference.

[borax]

...and a single SATA hard disk...

If you are capturing to a DVD compliant format then use a second (physical, not only logical!) hard disk and play 'ping pong':
Demux from one drive to the other, remux back to the first disk. Depends on your overall process. But usually each demux/cut/remux step is more or less a 1:1 copy of your movie and using two hard disks is faster as well as less stress for the hard disks (the read/write heads do not always have to jump between two locations)

[Werder]

I couldn't agree more with borax...

Golden rule for speed in video editing/conversion:
Read from one physical HDD and write to a second physical HDD!