Burn Time

I'm new to burning DVD's with iDVD and iMovie. My project is 12 GB and is taking over 5 hours to burn. Is this normal, and is there a faster way to burn DVDs on my Mac?

I have both a G4 with 867 MHz and a G5 with dual processor 2 GHz. a one hour project (about 13 GB) would take about 4 hours on my G4 with relatively simple menus and audio. it would take about 1.5 hours on my G5. Five hours for your project might be reasonable if you have somewhat fancy audio and DVD chapter menus.
You should be sure and limit the length of the audio on each set of DVD chapters to no more than90 seconds. More time is not necessary and longer times extend the burn time. Previous versions of iDVD actually limited this to 30 seconds.

Similar Messages

Encoding / Burning Time On Different Computers

We just purchased a few new Mac's.... an iMac 27"w/ Intel i5 2.8 and a MacPro w/ 2x 2.4 Xeon Quad-Core processor.
We bought the iMac's for simple photo editing and printing and the MacPro's for encoding and burning DVD's ... and now I am finding both encoding and burning the same, not good!
The encoding and burning time is almost the same on both computers... Actually the iMac is a little quicker (more then 5 minutes) then the Mac Pro
Why is the encoding time on both Macs basically the same?
My source files are MP4 H.264 10.05Mbit to be burns on a SD DVD (NTSC). We are putting about 25mins of footage on the DVD's.
Am I missing something? Should the Mac Pro with double ram and double processor be faster? Maybe a setting to speed up the encoding time on the Mac Pro?
Thank you for any help!

Hi William Q
Welcome to Apple discussions. Great question! Most Mac applications (iDvd included) are multi-threaded, at least to some degree. Multiple processors often boost performance in most multi-threaded applications as well as when one is multitasking; or having multiple applications running all at the same time.
The way to tell this is to run /Applications/Utilities/Activity Monitor.app, then right-click (or control-click) on the columns header line and ensure that the "# Threads" column is checked.
Now run your application(s) (as shown below) and you will see the number of threads they are executing. Note that this number varies according to what exactly the app is currently doing, as temporary task-specific threads may be created only when needed.
click here
Watch what happens when I launch iDvd as well as multiple apps, including FCP.
click here
Message was edited by: SDMacuser

Is An External DVD Burner Needed To Reduce Burn Time?

I burned a DVD consisting of 400 photos with added music from iTunes but took nearly 2 hours.
In the book "iLife '06" Michael Rubin suggests an Apple SuperDrive or compatible third-party DVD burner for burning DVD's as the minimum system requirements for the ilife suite.
Is the 2-hour burn time typical thus the reason for using a DVD burner? I will buy the burner if it significantly reduces the burn time.
Thanks,
Carlos Marques

To add to what Michael said, you actually would benefit from a slower burn time ... like making your project into a Disc Image then using Disc Utility to burn at the slowest rate possible, thereby eliminating some potential problems
As stated, you are stuck with the actual encoding rate unless you speed up your puter

Approximate Burn Times by Length of Project

I'm new to iDVD and just yesterday burned my first project, 10 minutes worth of footage and it took about 30 minutes to burn. Is this typical?
Can people who have more experience w/ iDVD assign some typical burn times to the following projects?
10 minutes of video:
30 minutes of video:
1 hour of video:
2 hours of video:
Also, I used a 4X DVD-R disc. Would it be faster w/ an 8X DVD-R disc? Is so, would it burn twice as fast as a 4X DVD-R?
Thanks for your thoughts.

In my short bit of experience, I have found that you can expect about one minute of processing time for the video section for each minute of video. Then, at the beginning, the processing of the write in and menu could take a while (anywhere from a few minutes to 15 or so depending on what you put into the drop zones, etc. The biggest hangup seems to be in the processing of the audio portion which comes after the video. The shorter your project the shorter the audion processing time but typically what I have been getting is about 20 minutes for audio processing after processing a video of a 30-40 minute project. And some people have had the experience (I did too) of having the audio processing take literally hours. There seems to be a bug in the program. You can check some of the other threads on this.
And, BTW, 30 minutes to burn a 10 minute project is not unusual. My general expectation is 1 minute of processing time for each minute of video plus 20 - 30 minutes for the audio when things are working right.
I have an older G5 (Dual 1.8 GHz late 2004 machine) so that may be a factor as well.
Don't know about the speed of 8x vs 4x as I burn my projects to a disc image and then use Toast Titanium to burn the actual DVD at "Best Speed"
Hope this helps.

Prebuy Ques: External DVD - Burner Burn Time?

I have a ton of files on CDs & ZIP disks. They take up a LOT of physical space. I want to categorize and burn them to DVD's so I can discard the ZIP disks, wipe most off my external LaCie HD and regain some storage space.
I've read several comments here about oh-so-slow DVD burning times.
So I have several related questions. I have a LaCie Burner on Order.
It comes with Toast.
Must a DVD be burnt in one session?
Or is multi-session burning possible?
Hopw much free space do I need when burning DVDs?
How long does it take to burn a DVD given my system's configuration?
Thanks in advance for responses.

1. If you buy DVD-R or DVD-RW media, yes. DVD-R media doesn't support multisession burning.
3. If you're using the Finder, you may need up to 9.4GB available on your hard disk to burn a DVD. Toast has a lower requirement.
4. As long as the DVD burner is connected through FireWire and you're burning a data DVD, you can burn a DVD in approximately one or two hours. Burning a DVD over the USB port on your machine will take much longer(and may not be possible at all), and trying to burn a video DVD will take several hours or days on a G3-based system.
(8815)

RE: Why cd burn times vary so much.

When burning songs to cd in itunes at 8x most take about 8 min. Occasionally this time spikes to 17 min for no apparent reason. Any ideas as to the cause are appreciated.

Jeffrey Jones2 wrote:
An incremental backup only copies files that have changed, or are new, since the last backup. So if only one song was added to the iTunes library, only that song would be copied, not the whole library. On the other hand, if you have, say, a week's worth of new mail, the Mail folder might take a long time.
In fact, it would be a few weeks. But even where many songs have been added to iTunes, it has never taken more than 11 or 12 minutes to update, yet each song would be 3MB minimum; most email messages are just a few KB. So it can't be actual copying time?
Incidentally, I had to remove iPhoto from the Pictures backup, as it used to take hours stuck on that one thing alone.

Burn Time I DVD 5

I dumped some digital footage from I Movie into I DVD, nothing fancy, approx 29 chapters no more than 1 minute each, no slides and a regular theme. The stats said 2.6 gb of 4 gb. I noticed it took almost 2 1/2 hours to go through the burning process. Is this normal?
I'm running I Life 5 on a Powerbook 15"
1.5 processor with 500mb of memory.
I ran through the tips real quick and didn't see anything on enhancing performance but again is the time to burn normal?
Also forgot to add, I'm getting the footage from an external firewire drive
rdee

is the time to burn normal?
Doesn't sound too odd. My Dual G5 2 GHz would take 45 minutes to encode 30 minutes, and then about 10-15 minutes to burn...so I'm close to an hour. You've got one less processor at 25% slower speed, so 2 1/2 hours seems to be in the ballpark. As always, your mileage may vary.....
john B

How to calculate burning times?

Hi Guys,
I need to burn an iMovie project onto DVD using iDVD, and am trying to work out how long it'll take to burn - I'll be just burning the project footage, ie: no chapters or menu's.
My iMovie project is approximately 35mins in length and around 1.5Gb in size. Anyone have any idea's how long this will take to burn to DVD using iDVD 08?
Also, I'll be purchasing a new iMac once they've sorted out the display problems - will this "burn" (same project) be any quicker on a new 2.4Ghz/4Gb Ram iMac with 10.5 Leopard as opposed to my current 1.33Ghz Powerbook/1Gb Ram?
Thanks.
Steve

Impossible to say for sure since the creating of a DVD depends on a great many factors which all effect time to do it. This includes the speed of your computer's processor, amount of RAM installed, how much free drive space you have, which version of iDVD you use, which type of encoding you use, etc.
But for your 35 minute project, if you budget 2 hours total, that should be the longest it will take and hopefully it will go a lot quicker depending on the stuff I mentioned above.
Patrick

Normal DVD burn Time?

I'm burning 1 .avi and 2 .dat movies to a dvd. Together, they take up about 3.5 gb of space.
I'm using toast to burn them. How long should a burn of this type take? This is really my first time burning a DVD, so I have absolutely no idea. It really seems like it is taking forever. It has been at least 30-45 minutes and the DVD is only 18% complete.
I m using toast titanium 8.
IF anyone can give me any idea I'd tremendously appreciate it. I'm just curious to see if I'm doing something wrong or something is just not functioning properly

If Toast is encoding at all then it can take quite a deal of time. Otherwise, as stated earlier it should take less than 30 minutes.

Dvd's for computers/.BUPfiles/calculating dvd burn time

I've now been told that my film will be watched on a computer. This means that, whatever, the film (which is a QT movie, 5.4 Go exported from FCP) needs to be encoded as MPEG-2? Computer dvd drives can read MPEG-2?
I ask the question because i did manage to create a dvd a few hours ago which i did in Toast. The one with the faded colours when i watch it on TV. But when i try to open it on my mac i get a folder containing files with extensions i don't know: .bup .vob .ifo My mac tells me i have no default application to open them. I get the same message when i try to open the same type of files when i insert the dvd of "Chicago", bought in a shop. Does this mean that the problem lies with the dvd which is not appropriate for a computer, or rather it's because i don't have the necessary program. (What is the most popular program used by Macs to read movies on dvd?)
I have to get this flippin dvd done within 4 hours, and already after trying a mini-test using Compressor, i've calculated that it will take about 4 hours to encode using Fastencode120minmpeg2. Is this normal for a 25 min film? I'm trying to install DVDSP3 right now... I'm going to try ur suggestion of putting my film directly into studio pro. Maybe the encoding will go faster than with Compressor. After that i have to burn the dvd too. With a 8x machine how long should that take? I mean how do u calculate?
If u still have time david ... or anyone else... i'd be grateful for help.
dswimmer

OK Shane. Thanks. So the problem is that i need a DVD playing application? I'm new to OSX and never really looked into it. I guess that OSX 3.9 does not come with a DVD player? I heard that VLC is one i can download free. Does anyone know if it's a good one?
As for the other question, will a mpeg2 play on a comp? And do those compression times i talked about seem normal? Maybe it's because i only have a 466Mhz processor? Is the think that took toast a long time the encoding? Or does the actual writing onto the dvd take a long time too?
Thanks for ur help
dswimmer

IDVD right format, problem with autoplay & long rendering/burning time??

I have a couple of questions, I am getting hdv3 codec, .mov files from a supplier. These I realised I cannot watch, edit or further use without having FCS Pro installed.
However I want to burn a SD-DVD with a Intro, Menu and Video all in high quality and 16:9 Scale.
So my question is in what format should I order/get the Videos in order to use them in iDVD? I have tried one different type already, a simple MPEG-2 .mov file including audio. However when I input the DVD in my Harddrive or on any Harddrive on a computer the autoplay function does simply not start up. (Yet, I can play using right-click, play/open with.. etc. and select the player)
Also this burning process took 30-40 min. for a 1min 30sec movie.. (I guess it was the rendering, but is this normal???) And can I downscale this consumption of time without large quality loss?
Thanks for answers & help!!!
Nik

Here is how I would order them:
- 853x480 pixels (more on this below...)
- 30 fps with progressive encoding (however, iDVD will probably convert it to interlaced)
- Motion JPEG at highest quality
*The 853x480 pixel thing:* I have found that if you let iDVD ingest a video not at these exact dimensions, assuming it is for a 16:9 DVD, iDVD will apply a horrible resize filter to the video which will make it very blocky and ugly. Basically, just do the conversion in QuickTime before you give it to iDVD.
I am not sure why this would be happening:
AstramediaES wrote:
However when I input the DVD in my Harddrive or on any Harddrive on a computer the autoplay function does simply not start up. (Yet, I can play using right-click, play/open with.. etc. and select the player)
For the last part of your question: depending on the speed of your computer and what quality settings you choose in iDVD, especially if you have a large, intricate DVD menu, this encoding time is absolutely reasonable. Unfortunately, there is really no way to reduce encoding times without decreasing quality. HOWEVER, I would still try the other quality settings in iDVD; you may notice no difference in the quality, but the end file size may be bigger to compensate for the shorter encode time.
Hope this helps,
Ian

IDVD slow burn time?

Hi people, just been playing with idvd and have tried burning to a dvd but it seems just a bit slow. The imported movie file is a widescreen MP4 at 699.5 mb with a running time of 1 hour 49 mins. When I bring it into idvd it tells me to change the project info so that it fit's to a dvd. I do this, putting it on the highest quality setting (professional), The other settings are Pal format and widescreen. When it burns it first encodes all the menus, then the film. The last time I tried this it took upwards of 8 hours. I ended up quitting the process. My mac is a brand new mac pro 2 x 2.8 quad core with 2gb ram and atleast 180 gigs of hard drive free. It came with leopard and I have run all the software updates available. All I want to know is if this time scale sounds about right - if it is then cool, it just seemed a bit slow to me.

That sounds a little long for a 109 minute movie. This Macworld article lists a 2 hr project encoded and burned in 3hrs 52 min on a 20" iMac.
The professional quality setting does two passes, one to examine the media to determine which parts can withstand the greatest compression, still or very slow moving parts of the movie, and which cannot, fast panning or action. The second pass then does the encoding.
Instead of burning directly to disk use the File->Save as Disk Image menu option. That separates the encoding from the burning. Once the disk image is created you can play it with DVD player to check out the encoding (and for typos-my biggest issue ). Once your satisfied the disk plays OK on your Mac burn it with Disk Utility or Toast at the slowest speed available. Also use good media. Verbatim-R is the most recommended brand here.
OT
Message was edited by: Old Toad

IDVD 08 Rendering / Burn Times

I have seen this on other posts, but it doesn't look like there are any solutions. I have a PwrMac G5 dual 2.0 GHz Proc. with 6.5GB of RAM. I can't believe that it really takes over 5 hours to render and burn a 4 GB DVD (118 minute movie). Are there any tricks I can try to speed this up? I am running Leopard, iMovie 06 (iMovie 08 took things away that I need)and iDVD 08.
Thanks in advance !!
dkm

Hi
I have a MacPro dual G5 2GHz. And it takes about 2 to 3 times the movie lenght
to encode depending on encoding quality.
I use pro-Quality and this takes about double compared with the other two BUT
the end result is so much better that I can stand the encoding time.
I burn at x1 speed. Less burn errors and a more playable DVD on various players.
Alt. DVD Studio Pro - in the FinalCut Studio pro bundle. SOMEWHAT faster.
• Cost is astronomical
• Still a lot to learn to be safe in DVD production (read steap learning curve)
Yours Bengt W

Longer Burning Time With iTunes 6

I really like 6 (even though I wrote before that I would never upgrade from 4.7.1 unless I had to, which I did since hardly any titles showed up in the Music Store with 4.7.1). However, has anyone else noticed that it seems to take longer to burn a CD with 6? By that, I mean it seems to take a longer period of time to start the burning process ("preparing disc" seems to be on the screen for several minutes before the burning process begins). Once the process starts it seems to be as fast as when I had 4.7.1. I also noticed that when the process first begins, the bar moves quickly along with the words "checking playlist". I never noticed that with 4.7.1

Similar problem here.... my calendars sync but I get an error trying to set up the contacts syncing and it won't sync them.
I got totally screwed when they took the iPod and .mac syncing out of iSync, cause I also sync my phone and Palm, and syncing either of those doesn't work right either.

Burn time excessive?

Created a movie using iMovie '04 (Since iMovie '08 won't install on my iMac 1.25MHz G4 - 768 MB memory)
Started iDVD '08 and selected an 7.0 Theme
Took about an hour to render the menus (I didn't create any) and now it's stating that the amount of time to process the movie is approximately 3 hrs and 45 mins.
What gives!!
-jP

*Your computer is at the bottom of the iLife'08 requirements*.
iLife '08 System Requirements
* Mac computer with an Intel, PowerPC G5, or PowerPC G4 processor.
* iMovie requires a Mac with an Intel processor, a Power Mac G5 (dual 2.0GHz or faster), or an iMac G5 (1.9GHz or faster).
* *_iDVD requires a 733MHz or faster processor_*.
* 512MB of RAM; 1GB recommended. High-definition video requires at least 1GB of RAM.
* Mac OS X v10.4.9 or later.
* 3GB of available disk space.
* DVD drive required for installation.
* QuickTime 7.2 or later.
* Other configurations may be supported. AVCHD video and 24-bit recording have additional requirements. Visit iMovie ’08 Camcorder Support for more information on AVCHD.
* 24-bit recording in GarageBand ’08 requires a Mac OS X compatible audio interface with support for 24-bit audio. Please consult the owners manual or manufacturer directly for audio device specification and compatibility.
* Burning DVDs requires an Apple SuperDrive or compatible third-party DVD burner.
* iPhoto print services are available in the U.S., Canada, Japan, and select European countries. Internet access required; fees and terms apply.
* iWeb requires Internet and web server access (.Mac recommended).
* Some features in iLife require .Mac. The .Mac service is available to persons age 13 and older. Annual membership fee and Internet access required. Terms and conditions apply.
What does Project/Project Info... say about the duration of your project? What encoding process did you select there?
Don't believe the time remaining. It fluctuates. It could easily take that long depending on the above.
*Download iMovie 6*: http://www.apple.com/support/downloads/imovieHD6.html

Burn Time

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