Taking too long to burn DVD

How much free space do you have on your boot drive. iDVD uses a considerable amount of scratch space and it's recommended to maintain a minimum of 20-25 GB free for this purpose.

Follow this workflow to help assure the best qualty video DVD: and make burning a second copy at a later date much quicker and easier:

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, launch DVD Player and play it. If it plays OK with DVD Player the encoding is 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.

Hi

As Master Old Toad writes - my notes follows:

To speed up iDVD

TO GET IT TO WORK SLIGHTLY FASTER

Choice of encoding method will give very different productions speeds. On my d-G5 2GHz

Professional Quality (movies + menus up to 120 min.) - BEST

Takes about 2 x times the other ones - but if quality is of essence

(Quality might be as good as or even better for movies under 60 minutes - by using Best Performances BUT not for movies up to 120 minutes)

2 hour movie + menu = about 4 hours to encode at it’s best on my system

Best Performances (movies + menus less than 60 min.) - High quality on final DVD

1 hour including menu = about 1 hour to encode

High Quality (in iDVD08 or 09) / Best Quality (in iDVD6) (movies + menus up to 120 min.) - slightly lower quality than above

2 hours including menu = about 2 hour to encode

Use an as simple DVD-menu possibly without any animation at all. This reduces processing speed dramatically. I use ”Old Theme - and Brushed Metal” and animation turned off.

An as fast Mac and as many cores/CPUs possibly. My PowerMac G5 has two CPUs and iDVD uses about 120% = use more than only one CPU/Core. How many it can address I don’t know (anyone ? ) - INTEL i7 even better.

If possibly - Use two internally e-Sata drives - Drive access takes a great deal of time

else FW-800 or FW-400 or USB2 or network storage (slowest and near to useless)

to work on one (internal, boot, Mac OS, Start-up hard disk - will be BAD - and slow

Normally my d-G5 2GHz takes about 2 x movie material when iDVD and Mac OS on one internal HD and material is on the other internal one.

Now with material on an external USB2-drive and an external Lacie FW-400 as Start-up drive material of about 1.5h will need about 4-6 hours to get encoded and burned to DVD.

An as fast Mac and as many cores/CPUs possibly. e.g. INTEL i7

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Hard Disks:

Minimum of 25Gb free space on Start-Up hard disk

(for SD-Video quality and about 4-5 times more if HD-material is used is a safe low limit.)

- if less than 5Gb very slow and unstable - less than 1Gb might even not start.

If possibly - Drive access takes a great deal of time so

-Use two internally e-Sata drives (in RAID)

If Mac with only place for one internal hard disk. Then I would try to use an

external FW (Mac OS Extended) one as Start-Up hard disk and store material

on the internal one e.g. iMac or ProBook or alike.

(MUST BE - Mac OS Extended (hfs) formatted to work for Video - UNIX / DOS / FAT32 / Mac OS Exchange works for most other things but not for Video)

-external Thunderbolt (fast) or

-FW-800 or

-FW-400 or

-USB2 or

-network storage to work on one (internal, boot, Mac OS, Start-up hard disk - will be BAD - and slow (slowest and near to useless so are USB-memory sticks too)

Choice and use of hard disks is essential.

-7200 rpm a must when HD-material (RAID even better - in speed)

-5800 rpm (OK for SD-Quality)

- I guess that a Solid State Disks might improve speed a great deal

Don’t let HD spin down or be turned off (in Energy-Save)

Move hard disks that are not to be used to Trash - To be disconnected/turned off

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RAM:

If amount of RAM is low - then using Hard Disk as temporarily storage - SLOWS DOWN iMovie 100 to 1000 times or even more !

I got 4Gb on my MBP - and it is not optimal - it could rather be 8Mb

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Applications:

No other programs running in BackGround e.g. Energy-Saver, Internet, AirPort, Bluetooth etc.

Goto Spotlight and set the rest of them under Integrity (not to be scanned)

Set screen-saver to a folder without any photo - then make an active corner (up right for me) and set pointer to this - turns on screen saver - to show that it has nothing to show

No File Vault on - Important

NO - TimeMachine - during iMovie / iDVD work either ! IMPORTANT

Lot's of icons on DeskTop/Finder also slows down the Mac noticeably - move as much as possibly to a better location e.g. Documents in Your User folder.

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WHEN in a REAL HURRY:

Start a new User-Account and log into this and iMovie / iDVD get's faster too

- if a project is in a hurry - a way to get it done

And let Mac run on Mains - not just on battery

from Karsten -

I assume that resolution and codec of source is another factor ... scaling (e.g. 1280x720 to 720x576 = that is an 'un-even' calculation). or, a difference in speed reg. to h264, dv-stream or AIC as input ....

Yours Bengt W