When Burning IDVD hangs at Encoding Audio

I have a 2 GHz PowerPC G5 iMac
1.5 GB DDR SDRAM
SuperDrive - Double Layer dvds
This is my first time using IDVD - I have a 2 hour movie that I am trying to burn.
It hangs and gives me the multicolored wheel when it is trying to encode the music during the burn process. It took about 5 hours to get to the point that it is now, and then an extra 3 since the multicolored wheel has been up. I have read other posts and some say, let it spin, and eventually it will finish. But I am not sure if they mean when the multicolored wheel is showing. Does anyone know what I need to do? I am desperate for HELP!!

Strange how I can't edit my post now even though it's only been half an hour...
I checked on the progress of the burn and the audio was finally encoded after about five to ten minutes of the "spinning lollipop". It said it was encoding the audio and seemed to hang, but when I went back to check on it the DVD was already burned. I looked for other advice on these boards and people recommend taking the MOV file from your iMovie project and dumping that directly into iDVD instead of exporting from iMovie to iDVD. To do that, control-click (or right-click) on your iMovie project icon in the Finder. Go to Shared Movies > iDVD and find the MOV file in that folder.
Many people have had this problem with iDVD hanging at the "Encoding Audio" stage, but if you leave it long enough, it will eventually finish. I think it's just a bug with the progress bar.
Good luck.
P.S. the movie that I was burning is only about 7 minutes long. I had first tried burning it from my PowerMac G4 but moved to an iMac G5 for my final attempt at burning and it now works. The first time around on the G4 the audio never finished encoding but after moving the iDVD project (and all the support files), it burned the DVD without any problems.

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I'm not near my Mac right now, but I think its in the project info window. I believe it comes up when you 1st ship your movie to iDVD. There is a a drop down style menu with 2 choices. I do not know if you can change this setting once you are past it. You may have to re-enter iDVD through iMovie and start over.

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Hello, tarkin,
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This question is frequently asked!
iDVD is probably not 'hanging'. Disregard any messages that iDVD is not responding. It is. Do not force quit.
Encoding audio is the slowest part of rendering, and can take many hours. Great patience, even an intermittent alternative hobby, is called for.
Make sure no other application is running, make sure you have not set the hard disk to go to sleep and that the screen saver will not come on. Leave it overnight, or have a 36 hole game of golf.
Sooner or later iDVD will finish!

IDVD failing to encode audio

Help ! I am making a DVD for the high school baseball team and the banquet is next week. I did the same thing 2 years ago without incident. My iMovie is a slideshow of digital photos set to music. When transferring to iDVD, it encodes the menu, encodes the video (takes 2 hours) and then fails to encode the audio. The colored circle spins for a few minutes. The burn circle stops spinning. My laptop (Powerbook G4) spits out the DVD disc blank. I tried taking off all songs expect one that I used 2 years ago without incident. Did not work either. I am very very disappointed. The kids were going to love this. Any ideas ? If worst case scenario occurs, is there someplace (I live in Ann Arbor) I can take the iMovie file to and have them make a DVD ? Any advice is greatly appreciated. I am working with iMovie 5 and iDVD 5. Will it help to upgrade to ILife 06 ? Thanks

I only have 1.21 GB at this time because I
transferred the iMovie to my laptop. Having said
that, the reason I put it on my laptop is that I made
the iMovie on an external hard drive with over 300
GB. The problem first occurred on the external hard
drive (Western Digital). I thought moving it to my
laptop might make a difference. It did not.
iDVD needs to use your start-up hard drive for many things when creating a DVD. You need to freeup at least 10 GB (15 or 20 would be better) for things to work.
My son plays for Huron. We split with Pioneer. I live in A2
but went to ND. Are you still willing to help me ?
Certainly - but since I live near Rochester, NY all I can do is offer written support here in the Forum
Just as a general rule of thumb, OS-X needs something like 10 to 15% of your drive kept free of OS use. So if you have a 60 GB drive, you will need something like 6 GB free JUST FOR THE OS! That's why I said you need to freeup about 10 to 20 GB.
The problem first occurred on the external hard drive (Western Digital)
What is the format on this drive? They usually ship with a Windows format and need to be reformatted to a Mac format to work well with all things Mac OS-X.
F Shippey

Problem when burning idvd project

hi,
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the duration of the film is 74 mins. i tried it on best performance and best quality but still no luck
is it really that hard to burn a dvd project. this happened to me 4 years ago on an older mac and older imovie. this time i thought they may have sorted out there issuse with burning dvd.
i have over 40gb of space left on my mac
am i missing anything.
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cheers
lib

hello,
i created Disk Image last night and everything was ok. iv got over 40gb space left. plenty.
i then opened toast and tried to burn it. again no joy. iv got toast 9. under the video section i select VIDEO_TS FOLDERS. it still wouldnt let me burn it.
iv just ordered some new blank dvd verbatim to see if these work. iv been doing some research and alot of people say these brand are good. so ill give them a try but i have my doubts.
my content is 3 audio tracks from my itunes, about 20 photos and 70mins worth of video.
please could you ask me if there is anything else you would like to know.
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Try to burn idvd disc = wont encode

Getting an error message, some kind of error when trying to encode. Cannot burn the disc
Any ideas. Spent hours making the slideshow and now cannot burn.
Thanks

What was the format of the audio track you used in the menu? Try converting it to aiff and replace what's there now.
If you're using the default music replace it with something else and try again. Or change themes.
Follow this workflow so you can avoid creating coasters if the process doesn't work:
Once you have the project as you want it save it as a disk image via the File ➙ Save as Disk Image menu option. This will separate the encoding process from the burn process.
To check the encoding mount the disk image and launch DVD Player and play it. If it plays OK with DVD Player the encoding was good.
Then burn to disk with Disk Utility or Toast at the slowest speed available (2x-4x) to assure the best burn quality. Always use top quality media: Verbatim, Maxell or Taiyo Yuden DVD-R are the most recommended in these forums.

Goal: Burn iDVD w/Chapters & 2 Audio Channels

I have 10 songs each with video and two audio channels. I want the dvd to go from one song to the next, but also want to have chapters so that I can quickly get to #8 from #4 (for example). What I've tried:
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2) Exported all 10 as one sequence with a chapter marker for each song via QuickTime Conversion - got 2 stereo channels - poifect - but only one long 'chapter', the only way I can move thru is via FastForward - not good.
Manuals say just add chapter markers (not at beginning, >1 second apart from each other, only 99, etc), but I can't get them to function in iDVD.
SHOULD QuickTime keep two audio channels, if so, how do I do it?
SHOULD I be using QuickTime Conversion - does it toss the markers?
Help and Thanx

I've found the articles on Ken Stone's site about chapter markers and preparing Final Cut materials for iDVD extremely helpful. I would suggest you check them out and try the suggested workflows. The site address is www.kenstone.net
Best of luck.

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I have been reading a large number of posts regarding iDVD freezing, having a spinning beachball, and hanging while encoding audio. I have not been able to find a post where it discusses the crashing/unexpected quitting of iDVD. I have tried a couple of times to get the burning process started, as I thought it may have been a small glitch, but to no avail.
Should I follow the steps marked out in:
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=335417&tstart=30
I usually complete the final process of iDVD with all Energy Saving and Screen Saver preferences set to "Never". I usually would delete encoded assets, but I did not have time before I went to work to try a third time.
This is the first time it has happened to me and I have completed about three projects successfully since updating to iDVD 6.0
Thanks in advance for your assistance.
Rodger

SUCCESS (But it took a while!)
When I arrived home form work, the first thing I did was to remove Flip4Mac using its uninstaller. This had no effect. iDVD still crashed bringing up the crash report dialogue box.
So I followed the instructions from http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=335417&tstart=30
I also repaired permissions (nothing to report there) and deleted encoded assests. Finally, I replayed my DVD project in the iDVD's preview/test section. The audio was out with the video. For some strange reason, my brain told me that the syncing between audio and video was the main thing to blame. So, I had a quick think and decided to remove all the fade ins and fade outs from my original iMovie project, remove all chapter markers, save the project, replace the chapter markers and then open the original iDVD file shared from this iMovie project. Then, clicked OK to update file to match, deleted encoded assests.
I do not know which part worked for me, but I woke this morning with a completed DVD (which is still to be tested in a DVD player).
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Rodger GW
PS I think Apple are a little sick of seeing my crash report coming through with the answer to "What were you doing when the application crashed?" being "Just trying to encode audio!!"
RGW

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Whenever the project is done encoding the video, it freezes right when it gets to the encoding audio process.

for over 10 hours
New info...
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File/Save as Disc Image...
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?path=iDVD/6.0/en/18.html
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There are variations to this process based on which OS X you are using...
Open Disk Utility (in Utilities folder in Applications folder), click on the virtual disc (maybe the .img) in the left-hand window. Click the Burn icon. A new window should drop down and your SuperDrive tray will open after clicking the Burn icon. Insert a recordable DVD. (Verbatim DVD-R preferred by me.) Click the Close button. Wait. Select a burn speed. If you hold your mouse cursor over the pop-up it says: "Select a slower speed to work around burn failures," so select 4x or slower for best results. Then click the Burn button.
-->If the virtual disk selection won't allow you to click the Burn icon, use the .img file instead. This may have changed in 10.3.9 and did change in Tiger.
Also, you can use DVD Player to play the virtual disk to check your iDVD project before burning to DVD. Launch DVD Player. File/Open VIDEO_TS (Open DVD Media... in Player 4.6). Find the VIDEO_TS folder and open that. (The audio folder is for DVD-Audio disks.)
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=93006

Burning hangs up at "Encoding Audio"

Hello Folks,
I have a 28 minute iMovie with video, photos, and audio. When I try to burn it on iMovie, it stops at the "Encoding Audio" stage, and I have to force quit. I can't find anything wrong with the iMovie file, as it plays fine in iMovie.
Any ideas? I sure need an answer, as this is an important video project.
Thanks,
Kevin
MacBook Mac OS X (10.4.9)

If it takes several hours, then I would suggest the following workaround - export your iMovie as a Quicktime movie using either "Full Quality" or "expert setting". Then import it into a new iMovie project, add chapters - if any, then export to iDVD. The Encoding Audio may occur but only for a few minutes.
Another trick is to export back to your camera and then import from the camera into a new iMovie project, add chapters, export to iDVD.
When we add audio to an iMovie project, it takes iDVD a long time to render the movie. Exporting to Quicktime or your camera combines the added audio to the video. For some reason, this makes it easier for iDVD to prepare for burning.
Do a search in this forum for "audio encoding" to read all the posts regarding this problem.

Encoding Audio delay using iDVD ...

Why are Apple not rectifying this bug?
iDVD appears, even to the most advanced user, to have crashed when it comes to the Encoding Audio section. But it hasn't. Let it run. Yes I know that even if you check the Force Quit menu it shows iDVD as "not responding" but it is working.
Come on Apple - sort this out.
MacBookPro Mac OS X (10.4.8)

iDVD 6 Encoding audio "delay." So am I supposed to believe that iDVD is actually "working" on encoding the audio even when after 12 hours it says in the Force Quit menu that iDVD is "not responding" and there's a spinning cursor?? Balderdash!
I have spent the greater part of the last 3 days trying to finish off a massive project for my family: transferring all our old home videos to DVD. Actually, I spent many many additional hours adding a soundtrack with songs and sound effects to these silent movies. And all for nothing!
Trying to fix the problem of iDVD stopping responding during audio encoding, we bought a 500 Gb hard drive to clear up more space on the hard drive: $$!
I even tried turning off the audio track and just burning the dvd without it. Not even that worked! It still freezes up.
APPLE, if you are listening. PLEASE PLEASE FIX THIS. This was to be my Christmas Gift to the family, and your product has FAILED.
powermac g5 Mac OS X (10.4.8)

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Swen

hi sue,
i purchased the verbatim dvd-r and burned 1 dvd successfully. unfortunately, it will not burn again and i am prompted with the same error message: Power calibration area error: (0x73, 0x03). what is weird is that when i tried to burn a .mov file using toast, i was prompted with an error similar to the idvd error (0x73, 0x03). Could this be a problem with both idvd and imovie? i am able to burn data onto dvds within toast, just not files that i have created using imovie and idvd. i hope this makes sense!
thanks

Encoding audio stalls

I've got like a hundred audio clips on my movie, and iDVD keeps freezing up when it comes time to encode audio...Is this normal? Should I just wait it out?
Thanks.

This question is frequently asked!
iDVD is probably not 'hanging'. Disregard any messages that iDVD is not responding. It is. Do not force quit.
Encoding audio is the slowest part of rendering, and can take many hours. Great patience, even an intermittent alternative hobby, is called for.
Make sure no other application is running, make sure you have not set the hard disk to go to sleep and that the screen saver will not come on. Leave it overnight, or have a 36 hole game of golf.
Sooner or later iDVD will finish!
BUT, 100 audio clips in one movie seems a lot and may slow things down. Did you ensure that they were all AIFF files?

IDVD won't ecode audio, 'not responding' = force quit

IDVD 6 /10.4.7/MACPRO
iDVD won't encode audio portion from iMovie had off.
original iMovie from DV camera, iMove encodes QT, etc
iDVD encodes video ( as noted by time bar) but when it gets to the audio portion it stops responding and then I have to forcve quit.
repaired persmissions, and delited the iDVD.plist
any thing I can do? iDVD 6 is the first time I used this after update

Scooper,
iDVD is "not" slow (nor fast) encoding (actually transcoding) audio. iDVD relies on the Quicktime framework. iDVD invokes an external library from the set of resources provided by QT.
If the encoding appears to be slow. It may find its root in various origins. First, MacOSX is a Unix system. Unix is not "preemptive". It means that access to resources occurs thanks to a "good will" mode between processes (to make things short). So, it may appear that some processes are stale, but things are usually well under control (by the kernel). So, don't be hasty in killing a process reported as "not responding".
If you consider that the encoding process takes too much time, there are ways to make things better. First: More RAM. No workaround to that. Give some room to your Mac. Keep also in mind to keep free room on hard drive at least equal to 2 1/2 times the amount of RAM of your system. The Unix kernel of your Mac handles a "swap" that is used to virtually create an amount of RAM larger than what your system physically has. The kernel simply uses your hard-drive as buffer to store copies of RAM blocks occupied by portions of code or data not currently active. If all this is too small, the kernel will spend an awful amount of time dealing with the short space (RAM + free disk space for swap).
One way to figure out if you're in such case is to use one of the many administration tools available to you. Open Terminal (or a X11 xterm) and type 'top' (without quotes).
Check the last line of the header for the "pageouts" indicator. If the number in parenthesis is not zero (0), repeatedly, it means that your kernel is swapping memory block from the physical RAM to the virtual RAM stored on the hard drive (swapping).
Hit 'q' to quit top. You can also try 'top -o cpu'. This will get you which process is currently running requesting the most CPU resources. Normally, on a Unix system, if one process needs CPU and is mostly the only one at the moment asking for CPU, it can be allocated most of the available CPU time and jumps to over 80%. If you consider this "abnormal", just look at the "Load Avg." indicator. It tells you how many processes are "waiting" for their turn to access the CPU - it's averaged throughout the time, through 3 numbers. Remember the "good will" mechanism. If it remains low (up to 3, for a household Mac), then, do not worry. If it goes above, then try to quit some other user applications. An idle system reports numbers below 1.
These few sysadmin tips will tell you a lot about your system's health. Perhaps, you'll figure out by yourself what's wrong. For sure, not iDVD
Try perhaps upgrading to QT 7. There are benefits to that.
T.

When Burning IDVD hangs at Encoding Audio

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