How long to burn DVD?

[Theus]

guys,

how long does it normally take you to burn a 2gig video on dvd+r? I'm taking almost 4 hours!! (writing alone, editing not included!) i'm a newbie and i've just 'successfully' burned 2 dvd's but each taking too long (i think).

my set-up, 250g maxtor 2 one touch external hard drive (7200 rpm, 16mb cache, firewire & usb 2.0 connectivity), sony external 16x dual layer dvd-writer (both firewire & usb2.0). centrino 1.6g laptop, 512mb sodimm, 128mb ati radeon 9700, 40g hdd. what gives? from the above, i'm thinking the bottleneck is with my processor? anythinng i can do (besides getting a fast desktop, of course!)

i'm using nero vision express 2, which came bundled with my dvd-writer.

lastly, since i only have 1 firewire connection on my laptop, would you recommend using this to connect my external hdd? or to connect my external dvd-writer (my current)?

thanks!

[solarfox]

Well, I suppose this depends on exactly what your process is. Are the files you're dragging over to NeroVision already encoded as DVD-compliant MPEG-2 files, or is NV having to reencode them from another format before burning?

For the actual burning process, a 1.6GHz CPU is more than adequate, by far -- I have an old 350MHz K6 system here that can, and does, burn DVDs all the time, and each disc only takes about 15 minutes or so. (That system only has a 4X drive.)

For the encoding process, on the other hand, it depends on a number of factors, not the least of which is what format the original source file is in. (DivX and XviD files seem to take a long time to convert, probably because the codecs are compute-intensive in themseves already.) A faster CPU might help with this, but only to a certain extent.

[Theus]

thanks solarfox!

i connect my mini-dv handycam to my laptop via firewire. windows movie maker automatically detects the connection and prompts me to transfer the files then i select DV as my file format, very huge file!

then i use windows moviemaker to edit the transferred video (adding audio, titles, transition effects, etc.). file is then saved as .avi.

i only use nero vision express to create chapters, add other titles & burning to my dvd-writer.

sorry i think i'm confused, where does saving in "DVD-compliant MPEG-2 file" come in? any advise? which particular format should i use without sacrificing video quality?

again, many thanks!

[Gurm]

Ok, 4 hours to do a full re-encode and burn is not too terrible.

That's what is happening - you're taking an .avi file and ENCODING it as DVD-compliant MPEG2. That's a hefty order for any 1.6gig laptop chip. 4 hours isn't too shabby. Those of us with 3ghz+ chips can do it in something APPROACHING realtime, but not quite.

The actual burn, methinks, takes well under 10 minutes for you.

[Theus]

thanks Gurm! i think you just shed light to my query. you're right, actual burn time for me is a little under 10 mins.

oh well, i guess i just have to live with it (at least for the moment!). is there any 'trick' i can do to at least improve speed?

thanks again to you & solarfox.

[ZippyP.]

Nero doesn't have many tricks available when it comes to video encoding. Around here nero is used primarily to burn disks only as there are other dedicated encoding programs that do a much better job. Dedicated encoding programs do have many "tricks" or adjustments that can be made to them and that's why the experienced people around here prefer to use them. I would refer you to TMPGEnc, Cinemacraft Encoder or Mainconcept as examples should you ever choose to try that route. There are excellent guides for each of them on this site.