I have a Quicksilver 733Mhz with 640MB RAM, approx 100GB of disk space and Mac OS X 10.3.9. On Friday, a client of mine gave me a 90minute video of a presentation that was made a few weeks ago. It was compressed into .avi format and burned onto a CD (it came out to slightly less than 700MB). He wanted it burned onto a DVD so he could send it to a client of his and they could watch it. I copied the avi file to the HD of the Quicksilver (ATA 66) and told Toast Titanium 6 to make it into a DVD video.
This was at ~7:00p.m. EDT on Friday. It is now ~3:30p.m. EDT on Sunday, and Toast is about 90% of the way through "encoding" this movie. This seems to be taking an incredibly long time in my mind.
The DVD-RW drive in question is a Lite-On DVDRW SOHW-812S. Is there anything I can do to speed up making DVD's in the future? Would I be better off to put the DVD-RW drive into my HP Kayak (dual PIII-550Mhz, 512MB RAM, 40GB HDD, Win2k SP4) with a PCI ATA 100 Controller? Is there anything I can do to speed up encoding under Mac OS X? Is this slowness something that I just have to put up with, given the hardware I have?
Thanks for your help,
The Czar
The last DVD I made with iDVD involved transcoding two 42-minute "Enterprise" DIVXes in .avi format into a DVD, and it took almost a solid day on a 1.5 Ghz Powerbook. (Set to run on AC with power management disabled, so it was basically as fast as a 1.5Ghz G4 desktop would be. It's amazing how untouchably hot an Al gets under those circumstances) Assuming "Toast" uses an algorythm of similar efficiency two days isn't that out of line on your system. (My guess is they both use Quicktime, but I've never used Toast so I dunno.)
This was rendering to a disk image, incedentally. I'm sure the speed of your DVD writer is irrelevent.
--Peace
As with cars - how fast you wanna go is approximately equal to how much you want to spend.
As Eudi points out, your render time is appropriate for what you're doing. The only thing that will speed this up this approach is a faster CPU. Your PIII has probably roughly similar transcoding ability, so no advantage there.
Alternatively you might consider some sort of video-out/video-in system that can output to external video tape (eg: a DV cam's analog inputs), then re-capture the video as an MPEG2 file which can be directly burned to a DVD. As there is little cheap hardware available for Macs this is where that old PC might be useful. I'm not familiar with this sort of thing for wintel though, so you'd have to do some research.
On my Macs I've used the Instant DVD USB box which does a very nice job, but as they are discontinued I doubt you'll find any of these around any more. There's always eBay of course . . .
dan k
Thanks everyone for your comments. I'm less frustrated because of the speed now.
Another problem has cropped up: Whenever I try to encode the video, when it gets to the end of the status bar, it pops up a dialogue stating: Couldn't complete the last command because of a Mac OS Error. Result Code =-50. I've looked up the text of the error, and it appears to be due to: Drive number in response packet was wrong. Now, I haven't a clue what this means, or what I can do to fix it, but if someone does know, I would be immensely grateful.
I'm running Toast Titanium version 6.0 on a Quicksilver G4 733Mhz, OS 10.3.9 with a Lite-On DVDRW SOHW-812S.
Thanks for your help.
Cheers,
The Czar
Assuming this error pops up during the "burn" phase, my first guess would be the drive doesn't like the media you have in it. In my experience DVD burners can be hellishly picky. (Particularly with RW media.) You might want to see if your drive has up to date firmware. Admittedly there's a good chance you'll have to install the drive in a Windows machine to do it. (One of the annoyances of owning a Mac, unfortunately.)
I always render to a disk image and burn using "Disk Utility" rather then trying to process straight to disk. Admittedly I do so partially because the DVD burner is in the slowest (useful) Mac in the house, but... it has its advantages in terms of seperating render issues from burning problems.
--Peace
Try burning ata slower speed I use some DVD +r medi that is rated 8x but it fails on my dvd player so i burn them a 4x and it works fine