Burn Speed

davidpjr · Post by **davidpjr** » Sat Sep 30, 2006 3:28 am

Is burn speed as slow as I think for a DVD or do I have some option set wrong. It seems nearly like it is burning in realtime.

Post by **Ron P.** » Sat Sep 30, 2006 4:14 am

Hi David,

It is recommended that your burn speed be set to a max of 4.0x. The last project I burned at 2.5x, and it only took about 10mins to burn a 30 min project (rough numbers).

If you followed the recommend procedures set out in the top sticky of this forum, your project properties matched through out, and you are burning your DVD to a compatible format, then the actual burning should not take very long.

You didn't state how long it is taking to burn your DVD, so how long is it?

davidpjr · Post by **davidpjr** » Sat Sep 30, 2006 12:30 pm

It took me about 90 min to burn a 120 min dvd.
I will look for that sticky. Apparently, I don't have something right.

blplhp · Post by **blplhp** » Sat Sep 30, 2006 1:20 pm

Your "total" burn time is also effected by how many menus/sub-menus you have, how many chapters and motion menus, if you're using background videos instead of background images, etc.

I had a project that had four video files in the media file timeline, with 16 chapters selected, a main menu and two chapter sub menus with a total video time of 77 minutes and a full 4.35 GB of movie material burned onto a single layer 4.7 GB disc at 4x burn speed and it took 48 minutes for the complete burning process to disc. And I have a 2.8 GHz Pentium D 820 Dual core processor with 2 GB of RAM. The actual "burning" time was about 22 minutes and the disc prep and menu rendering time took the balance of the time, 26 minutes.

Hope this helps.

davidpjr · Post by **davidpjr** » Sun Oct 01, 2006 4:02 am

No, I did not have any chapters made as a matter of fact. I was just converting an AVI, after I chopped out the the part I did not need. Reading the Recommended procedures for new users, it might be that I need to change some options. Experimentation continues

Tks

Post by **Ken Berry** » Sun Oct 01, 2006 4:30 am

You might want to have a closer look at the Recommended Procedures. I suspect that you were skipping a step. You have an AVI that you want to burn to DVD. But a DVD requires a DVD-compatible mpeg-2. To get there, the Recommended Procedures essentially advise you to first go to Share > Create Video File > DVD to produce that DVD-compatible mpeg-2.

During this step, make sure you select appropriate project properties including Field Order (essentially, if you captured from a digital video source, use Lower Field First; but if you captured from an analogue source, use Upper Field First; and if you are doing a slideshow of still images, use Frame Based).

The other important quality factor is bitrate: for highest quality DVDs, use 8000 kbps. This will allow you to burn about 1 hour of video to a single layer (4.3 GB) DVD. 6000 kbps will allow around 90 minutes of video in good quality; and 4000 kbps will allow 2 hours of reasonable quality video.

The final factor here is the audio codec you use. LPCM will give excellent quality but creates large files, so you will fit less video on a disc if you use this audio format. Dolby gives a very much smaller audio file, so you can fit up to 10 or 15 minutes more of video per disc if you use Dolby. Mpeg layer 2 audio gives similar small sizes to Dolby, but is not part of the NTSC DVD standard, so will not necessarily work on all NTSC DVD players.

Once you have produced this mpeg-2 file, and ONLY then, go to Share > Create Disc > DVD, and in the burning module, insert the mpeg-2 file(s), create your menus and burn. Make sure the burning properties are exactly the same as those in your mpeg-2. (Check in the second icon in the bottom left of screen; and/r make sure the 'Do not convert compliant MPEG files' box in that icon is checked.) Otherwise, the program will try to render the file again, as well as all the multiplexing of video and audio, creation of menus etc, all on the fly, which is a big ask for any computer. This is very likely to cause some loss in quality and also open the possibility of problems such as the whole process coming to a screaming halt.

When burning, only use a low speed (we generally recommend a maximum burn speed of 4x), regardless of the rated speeds of both your burner and the discs you are using.

davidpjr · Post by **davidpjr** » Sun Oct 01, 2006 6:37 pm

Am I wrong or does it seem that setting these preferences beforehand are not possible unless you are actually doing something like getting ready to capture or share...

sjj1805 · Post by **sjj1805** » Mon Oct 02, 2006 1:34 am

davidpjr wrote:It took me about 90 min to burn a 120 min dvd.
I will look for that sticky. Apparently, I don't have something right.

Just to clarify a point.
After setting up your Menus there then follows two stages.

1. Render.
This stage will vary from a few minutes to a few hours and depends upon several factors, the most significant is the source material. If the source material is already MPEG2 DVD compliant - and not too large to fit onto the DVD then most of the work has already been done. The rendering process simply needs to create you DVD Menus. Here the process will take minutes not hours.

On the other hand if you have a video that is not DVD compliant such as an 'avi' file then the video must also be converted. Now the process will take hours and not minutes.

2. Burn.
Once the DVD has been created on the hard drive it must now be transfered onto a DVD disc. As stated previously by Vidoman the recommendation of this forum is to burn at no higher than 4x no matter what the capabilities of your DVD writer and the discs are.

A completely full 4.3 GB disc will take somewhere in the region of 15 minutes.