Production of rapid DVDs

[Berzelius]

Possibly a slightly unusual request, but I'm after finding the fastest method of burning a DVD. The reason for this is the odd occasion when there are 3 programmes on TV that I want to watch at the same time. So, I watch Number 1 as broadcast and I record Number 2 on my DVD recorder. And Number 3? Well, I use the TV card on my PC to record it as an mpg file. Unfortunately, my PC is in probably the most uncomfortable room in the house for watching a TV programme so, in the past, I have burned it to a rewritable DVD so that I can watch it elsewhere. Unfortunately, this means that I have to spend 3 - 4 hours burning a DVD in order to watch a one hour programme that I will never watch again.

So what I'm after is a way of speeding up the DVD burning - quality is not too important for such a one off job. In desperation, I recently tried creating a PAL VCD file and simply copying it onto a CD-RW. I was pleasantly surprised to find that it played on my DVD, that the quality was acceptable for the job and that it took under 35 minutes to produce a file from a 30 minute programme, which could then be copied to a CD in a few minutes.

However, can anyone suggest a way of speeding up the process even more?

[2Dogs]

The actual DVD burning part of the operation need only take 6 minutes, or even less if you have a 20x burner. I get good results burning to certain media at 16x, however, which is good enough for me. The trick is to find media that works well with your particular burner. Burning at 12x will only take another couple of minutes.

I suspect most of the time will be taken up in authoring the DVD, however. Taking your single large mpg file the main thing will be to enable Smart Render when creating the DVD. You should be able to do this by inserting the mpg file into the VS burning module in the "Create Disc" step. See also this topic by sjj1805

Suggested Workflow

It's possible that in the past, you have had to re-encode the mpg file - this could be due to the file size being greater than 4.35Gb or so, and therefore not fitting onto a single layer DVD - or it could simply be that you had not managed to enable Smart Render. If your file is greater than 4.35Gb, you might need to adjust your capture settings, or burn to a dual layer disc.

When everything is working right, Smart Render should perhaps take 10% of the video run time - so the whole process, from inserting the mpg file into your authoring project to the finished, burned DVD could take about 20 minutes.

[Berzelius]

Thank you for your reply. A few points if I may.

1) Following your mention of Smart Render I delved into the subject - I found the book Getting Results with VideoStudio 9 very informative. As far as I can see, Smart Render only comes into its own when you make changes to a rendered project. As my aim is to get a viewable copy of a TV programme without any frills I will only be rendering it once, viewing the result and then binning it.

2) I always create an ISO file and then burn that file to disk. Does creating an ISO file mean that the burning speed of my DVD drive is irrelevant (the time for copying an ISO file to a disk is only 5-10 minutes)?

3) Since my initial post, I've been playing around with the options for burning a disk in Share and discovered that I can create an LP DVD one. This seems to cut the TV programme time: burning time ratio down to about 1, the same as found for creating a VCD.

[2Dogs]

Thank you for your reply. A few points if I may.

1) Following your mention of Smart Render I delved into the subject - I found the book Getting Results with VideoStudio 9 very informative. As far as I can see, Smart Render only comes into its own when you make changes to a rendered project. As my aim is to get a viewable copy of a TV programme without any frills I will only be rendering it once, viewing the result and then binning it.

You should actually not need to render - i.e. re-encode your video at all. After you've cut out commercials or whatever, you don't need to re-encode the video - it can be Smart Rendered to a new file. That is essentially a file writing operation, which doesn't re-encode the video, and happens relatively quickly, perhaps at 10x the video run time, or 300 frames per second if you like.

2) I always create an ISO file and then burn that file to disk. Does creating an ISO file mean that the burning speed of my DVD drive is irrelevant (the time for copying an ISO file to a disk is only 5-10 minutes)?

No. You can burn an ISO file to the disc at whatever the rated speed your burner is capable of with the media you are using. You can burn DVD folders at the same speed. The main advantage of using the ISO file or DVD folders is that it breaks down the disc creation process into more separate steps. For me, that means you're likely to lose less work if you have a problem in any one of the separate stages.

3) Since my initial post, I've been playing around with the options for burning a disk in Share and discovered that I can create an LP DVD one. This seems to cut the TV programme time: burning time ratio down to about 1, the same as found for creating a VCD.

That's better, but it still sounds like you are re-encoding the video. The key to the whole thing is getting Smart render to work. You have to match your output properties to the source file properties.

I've been archiving some weekly TV shows to disc. In my editing project, I multi-trim out all the commercials from the single 4.35GB source mpg2 file. Since it's from US TV, that amounts to at least 30% of the video duration. Horrifying, isn't it?

I then Smart Render the trimmed footage - which takes approximately 5 minutes.

Adding that file to my Disc authoring project in the "Create Disc" step, it then takes a few minutes to output to an ISO file.

Since that file is only about 2.9GB, being a one hour show net of commercials, it then takes less than 5 minutes to burn it to DVD+R at 12x to my preferred blank media. For the Samsung burner I use for that part of the operation, I use TDK or Imation 16x DVD+R discs that carry the "Made in Malaysia" label. They use the Daxon AZ3 media code, and give great results with my Samsung burner.

At no time is the video re-encoded or "rendered".

VS11 has a new feature called "MPEG Optimiser" which gives you a clear indication of whether or not or which parts of a file will be Smart Rendered. In VS9, the only true indication that Smart Rendering is occurring is that the preview screen will stay black, and the generation of the trimmed mpg file will happen quickly.

[Clevo]

Buy another DVD recorder, you can then split the signal from the antennae.