Multi-tasking while importing, exporting, encoding, burning, etc, etc.

Question

Am I in any way endangering my project if I use the mac for other functions like being online, receiving email, wordprocessing, etc, while my IDVD project is busy encoding assets, and getting ready to burn, or burning dvds?
I ask because my experience with IMovie is that I need to be disconnected from everything else--the internet, even my printer/fax/copier/scanner when working on a project or horrible stuttering occurs. The stuttering will eventually happen regardless after I have enough extracted audio and audio edits in the project (it doesn't seem to like that), but at least I can put off working around that when disconnected.
It has been taking about 7-8 hours to create a disk image of a 90-minute project and I've been afraid to use the computer for anything else lest the virtual dvd gets screwed up with stuttering or slow motion audio.
Any suggestions??
Thanks a lot.
spb001

Answer 1

In theory, you should be able to do anything while running a non-realtime application (like iDVD). If there are side-effects, it is because there are bugs. The only thing you would do is slow the application down by contending for resources (like memory or the disk). If the application is written properly, you should not notice problems. I quite often will work on something else while processing a DVD. Typically, I am working on something else in iMovie for a different DVD. I have not noticed problems.
Now, iMovie is a different application because it does involve some realtime operations. Anytime you are importing video from or exporting video to a device then you do not want to slow the application down. If your machine is fast enough, you might get away with it. But I wouldn't recommend that. If you are exporting DV to the disk or extracting audio, there shouldn't be any reason why you can't work on the computer at the same time. I do it all the time and don't notice any problems.
Again, just because you can do it, doesn't mean you won't experience issues. These are bugs that need to be reported. As always, write your DVD to a disk image just in case something happens. Mac OS is supposed to be an OS where an app crash doesn't affect anything else, but I wouldn't want to live by that. Most of the time I let iDVD run by itself because I just don't have enough to do for the amount of time that it runs.