I am a newcomer to all this and do not yet understand the technical words! I have just bought a Sony minidv camcorder and used movie maker on my pc to edit. I added music, titles etc and decided to save it as i want to burn it to dvd. I used the save to pc option i think it was called but this took about 5 hours!!! I left it overnight and it seems to have saved although i have not checked it all yet. Is this normal amount of time and can i reduce this anyway? To give an example of normal speed when i copy and burn a feature leength film using DVD shrink and nero the whole process takes about 90 minutes. I havent got the fastest pc but its ok. Also is there a way i can send a small clip ) about 3 minutes long) via the internet as i want to send some old footage to my family?

[melliott1963]

Depending on the length of your movie, 5 hours sounds a reasonable amount of time (unless the movie was only a few minutes long!). Bear in mind that every single frame of your movie has to be analysed and rendered into MPEG 2 format - an hour's video means that 14Gb of raw footage needs to be compressed into just over 4Gb in order to fit on a DVD.

The only way to speed up the process is to buy a faster PC or, if you've more than one PC and start using Sony Vegas, you can utilise the Network Rendering facility that splits the video into segments that are rendered by multiple computers.

The reason why DVD shrink is so much quicker is because the program is working with files that are already compressed and is just reducing the bit rate (thus reducing the quality of the film) in order to fit a double layered DVD onto a single layered DVD.

The best way to send a short clip over the internet (assuming not all of your family have high speed broadband connections) is to reduce the actual size of the film (from 720 x 576 to 640 x 400 or even 320 x 200) and compressing it using DivX or XviD. There are many free programs available on the web that will allow you to do this.

Hope this helps.

thanks for the info!

[shoehorn]

Originally Posted by melliott1963

The only way to speed up the process is to buy a faster PC or, if you've more than one PC and start using Sony Vegas, you can utilise the Network Rendering facility that splits the video into segments that are rendered by multiple computers

Hi melliott1963 - is this feature availible on the "lite" version, or just the full version.
Thanks.

[melliott1963]

When you say the 'lite' version, I assume you mean Sony Vegas Movie Studio.

I'm pretty certain that this feature is only available in the full Vegas software. I've looked at the Movie Studio manual and there's no mention of network rendering and, to be quite honest, I wouldn't really expect to see it in anything other than professional editing packages.