Blown away by render times

Mike M. wrote on 10/27/2003, 10:01 PM

I guess I'm a little naive. But I thought I'd take an old VHS that was about an hour and a half and render it to MPEG2 and burn a DVD. Wow.

Based on a short test it took 6 minutes to render 1 minute of AVI-DV. Assuming that, it would take 12 hours to render the thing.

Am I right?

Is there a faster way to do this???

Comments

johnmeyer wrote on 10/27/2003, 11:03 PM

Ah, the dirty little secret of making DVDs.

Yes, it takes a long time to render MPEG2 files for DVD. The time it takes depends on three things:

1. The speed of your computer.
2. The time require to render any effects you produce in Vegas.
3. The speed of your MPEG encoder.

#3 is fixed once you use Vegas, unless you want to degrade quality.
#2 is entirely dependent on what you have decided to do with the VHS tapes. If you are doing cuts-only edits, then there will be virutally no additional time required.
#1 is the big unknown. On my 2.8 GHz P4 system, I can take a one minute DV AVI file, put it on the Vegas timeline, and then render it in about one minute. In other words, I can do it pretty much in real time. If your system is half as fast, it will take twice as long.

TheHappyFriar wrote on 10/27/2003, 11:12 PM

Another solution for you is (if you're going to do this a lot) is to buy an mpeg-2 capture card (ATI All In Wonder, etc). Then you can capture and burn straight to DVD, with the correct settings. But, then you can;t do cuts and stuff.