DV Recording

[Vicki]

Hi all-
My daughter's birthday party is today and I was hoping to quickly add some party clips to the timeline and record out to DV in real time since I thought be faster. However, it rendered it at twice real time. Is that because I have a mix of camcorder .avi, digital camera .avi (640x) and photos? I did do a test with one clip from the camcorder and a title and it was real fast.

Is it a preferences issue? The whole project is about 20 min long and the process took about 1 hour by the time it recorded back to tape. It may be just as fast (or slow) to render to mpg and burn a DVD.

Thanks.

PS I'll try to burn a DVD before the party anyway so at least we'll have something to show just in case....it just won't have the party at the end on it unfortunately.

[sjj1805]

It sound pretty normal to me.
Your DV format is obviously the best format for editing, however when you create a DVD everything, DV Video, Slide shows, transitions, titles etc. must be converted to MPEG2. Dependant upon the complexity of what is involved it can take between 1.5 - 3 times the duration of the video to complete.

[etech6355]

However, it rendered it at twice real time

If you rendered to a new dv.avi file it's rendering very fast because the program is using "SmartRender". In other words it's just passing over the un-edited video sections & writing/copying this to the harddisk. So only the sections of the video that you have actually edited will be re-encoded to dv.avi.
The process is usually very fast with un-edited footage because of using smart-rendering..

[sjj1805]

I must admit I was a bit confused by whether she means twice as quick or twice as long. As etech6355 has said, if it is smart rendering then it will be very fast. However you have DV as your source material and I suspect you are creating a DVD so it needs to convert to MPEG2. Therefore it will not smart render and will probably take twice as long.

[Vicki]

Hi-
It took longer than real time to render and record back, even though I was just playing back to the camcorder, perhaps because of the mixture of types of files and formats in the timeline. It said it was rendering, before it activated the device.

I thought that would be faster than making the mpeg2 and burning to DVD, but I'm going to do that now anyway since people will be here in a half hour!! Pressure!

THANKS!

[Ken Berry]

Just to further muddy the waters, Vicki made it clear from the outset that she was NOT only using DV format video as her source material. Some of it was, yes. But she was also using, as she said "digital camera .avi (640x)" plus photos.

But it is this digital camera .avi which is most likely the cause of the hold-up as it is from a digital still camera. It is thus likely to be one which uses the MJPEG codec (good quality) which happens also to use .avi as its container extension. But of course in *any* project, whether it be to render everything to DV or to DVD-compatible mpeg-2, that particular MJPEG/AVI will need to be converted to the chosen format and that would take time. Then, of course, the still photos also have to be converted to that format as well. More time.

Anyway, I don't think it is surprising at all that this all took a fair bit more than real time to render out. For what it's worth, it was probably quicker to render it to DV format because SmartRender could be used on the real DV/AVI bits, thus saving some time. But if the intention then was to send it back to the DV camera to play through that over the TV, then sending it back to the camera would take real time to carry out i.e. a 20 minute clip would take 20 minutes to send back to the camera.

You would need to work out your own relativities in all this, but to my mind, overall, it would probably have been faster to render everything first to DVD compatible mpeg-2 and then burn it to DVD -- but probably only by a bit.