iDVD 11 rendering speeds slow in lion

381GB. Sorry for the delay. Caught Robot and Frank in between. Good movie.

Thank you Old Toad. Your accumen with Mac suggests I better watch how I ask questions in the future. I may get more of an education than I was asking for.

The DVD I was creating was a 2H 30M NTSC movie from a 2.3GB, .m4v file configured for AppleTV (720x480) digitized from VHS tape using eyeTV v3.5.

Saving as a Disk Image fooled me since the process looks exactly like iDVD's encoding. It actually took 1H 51M to encode the movie (I used the word "render" that may have misled you as to the direction of your response). The "Time Remaining" indicator was way off. First it showed 7H 48M remaining, then after 8M of encoding it dropped to 1H 16M remaining afterwhich it showed 45M remaining to multiplex and burn then write. The Time Remaining was, in short, very inaccurate in time and task.

The image file I created played with both DVD Player (5.5) and VLC (2.0.2). Initially I got confused with DVD Player because I failed to "mount" the .img file. The encoding was better than with Toast's copy.

The burn to disk took 30M for a 7.82 GB .img file.

Throughout all the encoding, multiplexing and burning and writing of the .img file I never saw more than 4 cores activated (Activity Monitor.app . Contrast with Toast that showed 8 cores (both real and virtual cores) activated.

I suspect that Toast took around 2H 30M to encode and burn but its image was not as good as the original. Had I used the HD plug-in (today I spent the $20.00 Roxio wanted for the HD plug-in) the image would have most likely looked as good as the copy you helped me create.

Now the $64,000.00 question. Why aren't all 8 cores activated with iDVD?

As I mentioned before, with Toast v11.2 all 8 cores are activated while creating the disk. Certainly my Mac Pro has the capability and the iDVD app has been around long enought to be written to activate all cores. Have the OS iterations since iDVD affected the way the app performs?

"iDVD is not aware (and cannot be made aware of) more than 4 cores. iDVD is also EOL so there will be no more updates or changes. To say the truth, iDVD is pretty old by now. iDVD 7 was released in 2007."

Sadly I am aware of this fact. Nothing lasts forever, yes, but I am hoping that another company will step up to the plate with a comparable app. The Themes alone in iDVD make it feel like I am creating something professional.

Thank you all for your replys:

Bengt - I have never seen a reply on Mac speed and what causes slowdowns so succintly articulated. I am going to keep a copy of your reply nearby to remind me of this discussion and the next time I start moaning about the speed of my Mac I will consider your input (MacKeeper set aside - wasted money).

Mishmumken - Old memories die hard with me. I have been a Mac user since '83. I always thought that Apple maintained their apps current with the hardware technology they were selling. In '09 I buy a Mac Pro, crunch a bunch of video, then I start getting 7H encoding times and go huh? Hence the reason for asking the question.

Old Toad - The exercise you put me through has really enhanced my knowledge of the video processing work I have been doing. I will remember your approach well into the future.