Hi. I'm hoping someone can give me some advice. I bought a camcorder from the USA , a JVC GR-D90. I've taken about 70 minutes of footage, and mananged to transfer this to my laptop using firewire. But I wanted this on DVD, so I bought an external DVD writer (Pikaone 16u)(USB2). It came with Nero. So I followed the instructions on NeroVision express, and eventually managed to burn the footage to DVD. However, this took 6 HOURS ......surely it shouldn't be this long??!! Maybe something to do with it being NTSC??

Any help would be really appreciated

[vonhosen]

Being NTSC won't affect how long it takes unless you are adding a step of converting it to PAL.

The 6 hours isn't totally unreasonble & will be for a number of reasons. Your DV footage captured is in .avi file format. For DVD it has to be encoded to MPEG & this is what probably takes the bulk of the time. (MPEG encoders vary in speed & quality some will do multiple passes for best quality & the more passes it does the longer it takes. I've had 60mins of footage take 24 hours to just do this stage in the bad old days) When the MPEG files are encoded the authoring takes place. This is the files being constructed to DVD format. Then the actual buring takes place & speed of this will vary on media & burner used.

[melliott1963]

I agree with vonhosen, and this sounds totally reasonable to me.

The main time taken is due to the fact that every frame of the video has to be analysed and compressed to make the MPEG file. Your 70 minute video will have around 126,000 individual frames (70(mins) x 60(secs) x 29.97(frames)) that need to be worked on.

I now make a point of doing my rendering overnight to save me from sitting around waiting.

Thanks guys

[dmpoole]

The next time you go from camcorder to PC try to record it has a MPEG2 or DVD compliant file straight away. That way you will save a hell of a lot of time.

[MarkE19]

Yes, MPEG capture will save a lot of rendering time, but will cause a fair few problems with any editing. It can also cause a loss of quality. IMO you should always capture as AVI and only compress the footage once you have finshed all your editing.

Mark.

[vonhosen]

Originally Posted by MarkE19

Yes, MPEG capture will save a lot of rendering time, but will cause a fair few problems with any editing. It can also cause a loss of quality. IMO you should always capture as AVI and only compress the footage once you have finshed all your editing.

Mark.

Same advice from me , if you want to edit &/or output to different formats (tape,disc,web) definitely capture and edit as .avi

[dmpoole]

I must admit the last time I captured using a PC I was capturing in VCD format and for the last 3 years I've been using standalone DVD recorders - saves a lot of bother.
However, my mate does wonderful DVD's in Pinnacle 9. He adds titles, edits, subtracts, does menus, chapters etc and all done with a MPEG2 capture.

I record mini-dv on to dvd-r in real time using my Panasonic dvd recorder that sits under the telly and finalise the disc. I then plonk the disk into my laptop and capture and author the video footage quickly.

Great for archiving raw footage which can be edited when you have time!

[kevink]

I guess the problem is, you still have to get the edited content back onto a fresh DVD. I have Pinnacle Studio 9 also and I suppose I could read the recorded DVD and edit in the program then record back to DVD. But I'm not sure its any quicker is it?

[vonhosen]

If you rip files from DVD for editing in Pinnacle

1) You are working with files far more compressed than DV .avi files.
2) You will not be able to do frame accurate edits because of the temporal compression used in MPEG encoding.