Benchmark of DVD encoding speed for those with G3 iMac

[vsalupo]

To all G3 users,

I found no information in this forum about DVD encoding from iMovie on a G3. Thanks to TerryJ for his offline assistance. I thought I would leave a post behind for those unlucky enough to be stuck with a G3 machine. Doing DVD work on these machines isn't difficult but it requires dedicating your machine to the task.

I have a 400MHz G3 iMac DV with 320Mb RAM running OS X 10.2. I used both iMovie 2 and iMovie 3 to create the projects to be used. On the recommendation of TerryJ, I exported my project clips using the 3rd party plugin from 3ivx (www.3ivx.com). The resulting files were then encoded via Toast 6 to a DVD. Both the iMovie export and the Toast encode were done with "Best" or "High" settings.

The 3ivx export to Quicktime movie in this setup took approximately 1hr per minute of video. It did allow me to compress clips overnight in pieces. Toast 6 did not allow this and would have required that my machine be continuously dedicated to this task for the total compress & encode time. As it was, I processed 5 clips on 5 successive evenings. Total time for 1 hour DVD = 60 hrs. When played in Quicktime player these clips were jittery. This affect dissapeared in the final encoded DVD image file.

The resulting clips were dropped on Toast 6 and encoded to a disk image. Menus were turned on and I used "High" quality. The 60 minute DVD image took 6.5 days to encode. The resulting image was mounted and was playable with DVD Player. The menus worked fine. The image quality on an iMac screen is "fuzzier" than I expected and definately of lower quality than the original video in the project. I haven't burned a DVD and played it on a television yet.

I hope this helps others gauge wether they want to move up to burning DVDs on these G3s. I was burning VideoCDs which was a much quicker process. I have not tried to do this with Toast 6 yet. So I don't know how the time compares between the Toast 5 way (plugin to iMovie) and Toast 6 (self contained in Toast with menu's). I will try this next if I don't like the quality of the DVD.

Lastly,

Can someone PLEASE donate a G4 to Me! ...Sorry, CPU envy got the best of me.

Vince

[AntnyMD]

G3 iMacs are perfectly suited to author content, but not really at all for software encoding. If I still had my G3 iMac, I would permanently set it up alongside my ADS Instant DVD box, and find some way to script it to make it an oversized TiVo. I'd also use it as my iTunes server for the stereo.

Even making VideoCDs on it took a loooong time using M.Pack.

[cbkilner]

Instead of software encoders, G3 users who can't economically add a G4 (slot-loading iMacs, iBook G3, etc.) should look into an ADS instant DVD for $180 at OWC http://eshop.macsales.com/Catalog_Item.cfm?ID=5448&Item=ADSMACAV1750
or the soon-to-be-available FastCoder from Lacie for $250
http://www.lacie.com/products/product.htm?id=10125&?bobhudson

[cbkilner]

BTW, the best workflow for using the ADS MPEG2 converter mentioned above is to edit in iMovie, export to tape, reimport via the ADS device.
The FastCoder needs Quicktime DV output from iMovie.