I always keep a check on my encoding time so as to roughly know what time to come back to my PC. I thought I'd throw up my findings for a 90min project with chapters but no menus - for your info or maybe for comparison with your own system - no doubt everyones system is different but here goes anyway....
On average looking back, it is taking roundabout 3hrs15mins to render a 90min project (from DV captured files). On a couple of occasions rendering has been just under 3hrs! Does this sound slow/fast?
I know from previous experience this is like almost double the speed of Studio8 on the same machine; I remember a couple of test projects taking 5-6hrs to render; the resulting files were great, but studio8 had a great habit of hangin/crashing, and maybe the resulting files were not functioning when you'd come to burn them... anyway my gripe at pinnacle over lol! At least Moviefactory is more crash-proof.
Software: ULEAD MOVIEFACTORY3
Project Length: Average 1HOUR 30MINS CHAPTERS with NO MENUS
Preferences: VCDcompliant (yes), Anti-flicker filter (yes) Resampling quality (Best)
DVD Save Options: Framesize: 720x576 standard PAL DVD, Quality/Speed slider: 90, Encoding: 8000 VBR, Audio: 224 mpeg, cant think of anything else..........oh yes all anti-virus and any other programs not needed are closed or quit before I open MovieFactory.
Time To Encode: 3hrs - 3hrs 15mins
MY SYSTEM
PC, AthlonXP3200+, with 512MB DDRAM, 256MB ATi Radeon graphics card, 2 hard-drives (80 & 160Gig - the 2nd h/d is partitioned in half - i.e. the 1st bit used to capture, the 2nd bit used to encode).[/b]