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Burning a DVD - How long?

J

jjmaximum

macrumors member
Original poster
Apr 8, 2004
94
0
Gainesville, FL
Just got a 17" 1.8 iMac and absolutely LOVE it! One of the first things I wanted to do is burn a DVD of some video on my MiniDV camera.

Imported into iMovie, did some editing and then moved it to iDVD and clicked Burn - it's been over 2 hours and still going. Is this normal or did I do something wrong?

Note: the video is 1 1/2 hours long.
 
H

H&Kie

macrumors regular
Sep 19, 2004
120
0
Don't worry, it's normal. My former eMac did about 4 to 5 hour to encode, multiplex and burn a 1 hour video using iDVD (clips imported from iMovie). Your iMac should be faster than this, but than again, encoding a DVD is a rather time consuming procedure
 
daveL

daveL

macrumors 68020
Jun 18, 2003
2,425
0
Montana
It's not the burn that's taking that long, per se, it's taking the DV and encoding it to mpeg2, encoding the audio and muxing them together. I think the iMax G5 is a 4x DVD+-R burner, but it will depend on what media you're using.
 
Mechcozmo

Mechcozmo

macrumors 603
Jul 17, 2004
5,215
2
Don't worry until it has been at least 24 hours with no result...

I've had 10 hour burns before (2 hours, blah blah blah) on my iMac 800Mhz.
 
J

jemeinc

macrumors 6502a
Feb 14, 2004
771
0
South Jersey
jjmaximum said:
Just got a 17" 1.8 iMac and absolutely LOVE it! One of the first things I wanted to do is burn a DVD of some video on my MiniDV camera.

Imported into iMovie, did some editing and then moved it to iDVD and clicked Burn - it's been over 2 hours and still going. Is this normal or did I do something wrong?

Note: the video is 1 1/2 hours long.
Click to expand...

Completely normal... The encoding takes forever , the actual burn time isn't that long... Once you hit "stage 4:multiplexing & burning" it's all down here from there- problem is you may not hit stage 4 until tomorrow ...lol...
 
J

jjmaximum

macrumors member
Original poster
Apr 8, 2004
94
0
Gainesville, FL
It finished in about 4 hours

Thanks for the comments...as you can imagine after an hour or so I was a little worried. They should post a little caution window the first time you click 'Burn' that it may take a while.

The finished product reminded me of how cool it is to be a Mac user. Moved from tape to DVD, have a cool title screen complete with music and chapters with no problems, cursing, downloading drivers, etc. on my very first attempt. One could only imagine the problems I would have encountered on the 'dark side'.

:D
 
Mechcozmo

Mechcozmo

macrumors 603
Jul 17, 2004
5,215
2
Any additional copies, BTW, take just a few minutes. You have already done the rendering, multiplexing, etc. So you just need to burn the DVD. I'd have to guess it at maybe 20 minutes for a second copy. Oh, but if you quit iDVD you lose your multiplexing data. Which sucks.

How much RAM do you have? More RAM can sometimes help make everything go faster (well, remove a bottleneck to the speed, but that is a technical thing). 512 MB of RAM might help you out... Just an IMO.
 
A

armandocerna

macrumors regular
Sep 22, 2004
106
0
Chico, CA
The first time I ever used idvd I thought my computer was broken. What you can do even if you close idvd is make a copy using toast it won't have to remix the dvd. Enjoy

Armando
 
topicolo

topicolo

macrumors 68000
Jun 4, 2002
1,672
0
Ottawa, ON
Just for the record, a full single-layered DVD should burn in about 15min without any encoding or other stuff (ie with data).
 
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