"1x" does not mean the same thing to DVD and CD burners. A CD burner running at 1x is burning at a data rate of about 150KB/sec, while a DVD burner running at 1x is burning at a rate of about 1.3MB/sec, about nine times faster. So I guess you could think of your 2x DVD burner as performing about as well as an 18x CD burner.
I've been using DVDa to burn several DVD's this week. At 1x a 1 hour video took 53 minutes to burn. At 2x the same video took 25 minutes. That's minus the prep time which was around 12 to 14 minutes for the menus.
To make a DVD you (your DVD Authoring application) needs to prepare the files, then actually "burn" the DVD disc. The first task can take a long time IF you're recompressing some or all the files and a little longer if you're making a fairly detailed menu system. The actual burning should be fairly fast and go as fast as you're drive can grab the data stream.
Just from memory, I don't really care how long it takes, the actual burning time for a full DVD disc (about 99% full) takes 30 minutes or less on my HP 200i 2.4X drive.
The Sonic Solutions forum ranks near the bottom for answers as there is only
one man that knows anything and he is not affiliated with the company. The
other people in the company do not participate. I found out from other forums
that MYDVD 4.0 will re-encode other codecs even if a slight peak goes over
8.0 VBR. When it re-encodes it uses 7.3 meg CBR Thereby doubling the writing
time. They also use the Main Concept codec to re-encode, at least as of a few
months ago. But AVI's should not be a problem.
When I burn a 60 second clip in DVD Architect is take about 14 minutes. Two minutes for lead in, one minute for tracks, and 11 minutes for lead out. I just recently purchased VEGAS+DVD. I have been using DVD Workshop. Can someone explain to me what is happening during Lead in and Lead out?
I'm assuming you are using a DVD-R burner, since the DVD+R burners don't have this problem...
As I understand it, originally the DVD spec said that you had to burn out to the 70mm radius on the DVD-R disk, or about 1GB. I don't have any idea why, but that was the spec. Hence the huge lead-out.
The most recent version of the spec apparently does away with the 70mm requirement, perhaps because of pressure from the +R camp. If you download the latest versions of Nero, for example, there is a check box that lets you select a short lead-out or a conventional lead-out "for compatibility reasons." For the past few months I have been using the short lead-out technique, and now my disks burn very quickly. Haven't had any compatibility issues so far.
BTW I guess the size of the lead-out won't matter much some day when burners can crank out a disk in 5 minutes, but it makes a difference now, even at 4X.
Hope this helps. BTW I'm using a Cendyne/Pioneer -05 (4X).