how long does it take to author a dvd

[rabitootoo]

its taking tmpgenc dvd author about 4.5 hours for a 4.7gb of material.
is this normal?

[lordsmurf]

No. Authoring should only take 15-30 minutes at most.

What all is TDA doing? Is it encoding video? What kind of menus did you make? What kind of video did you give it? Is it having to re-encode your audio?

[rabitootoo]

im not good with the terms. maybe its encoding too. i dunno.

i gave it 6 avi files, settings were 4:3 ratio NTSC, bitrate was 2000. thats all i remember from the top of my head. then i just clicked output. no menu cuz im new at this.
im using tmpgenc dvd author 3

the SIZE of the avi files were like 2.2 or 2.3 gb

[Noahtuck]

Well in the other versions of TDA it can take a lot longer than 15-30min if you have a lot of motion menus as it has to generate all the motion thumbnails.

If the newer version you are using is converting the AVI files to DVD compliant format then yeah... it would take a LOOOOONG time.

And converting from the avi, i'm guessing they are divx / xvid avi's, then yes the size is also going to go up.

If you were just authoring with everything else already converted, rendered, and ready to go, then yeah, it will take only 15-20 min.

[rabitootoo]

thanks for the replies so far!

so if i had avi's (divx avi's) then what step do i take before i converting it to dvd compliant format?

is it possible to just shove in the avi's into nero and tell NERO to convert it to dvd then burn it?

[lordsmurf]

Sure, Nero can do that, but it'll look like crap.

[Wile_E]

Only feed TDA mpeg2 files. The encoder built-in to TDA and TMPGENC is crappy and slow as dirt. Use a seperate mpeg2 encoder like CCE, Procoder, or Mainconcept. These are much faster and give just as good, if not better output. Then drop these mpeg2 into TDA.

[rabitootoo]

so is this what i should do for quality to be good:

1) convert rmvb to avi using winavi
2) somehow encode avi files using tmpgenc 4.0 xpress
3) then use tmpgenc dvd author 3 to author

are the steps sensible?

[rabitootoo]

Only feed TDA mpeg2 files. The encoder built-in to TDA and TMPGENC is crappy and slow as dirt. Use a seperate mpeg2 encoder like CCE, Procoder, or Mainconcept. These are much faster and give just as good, if not better output. Then drop these mpeg2 into TDA.

i see, thanks for the detailed answer. really helps. guess ill try CCE instead of tmpgenc xpress