Hello,

Well I have a Sony handy cam that I just got for christmas (with the mini DVD). I just recorded christmas (the length is about an hour long). Also I have a few songs in the background, pictures that I took with my digital camera at the end (which has special effects inbetween each picture) and one picture effect on the "bloopers". The length is about an hour long. I have had it running for two hours now and its 16% done and says remaining time is around 15 hours!!!! Do I need to "render" and what does that mean anyways?? Or can I just click on the file from roxio to make the DVD or from the DVD Architect Studio 4.5 if thats quicker or easier. This is driving me crazy...How long does it take to burn it to the DVD after its done rendering??? I'm not sure what form it is in, I dont even know how to change this, but at the end of the file name it says .vf if that helps. Any more advice would be great!

15 hours seems very suspicious. First a couple questions:

What is your hardware configuration? Processor, RAM, HD space?

The video from your handy cam that you added to the VMS timeline - is it a VOB file?

After you click "Make Movie", what video type are you choosing to render to? AVI, MPEG, WMV, ???

Now a couple things you can try in the meantime:

I would suggest trying to set your in and out points across about the first 1 minute of video, and do a "Make Movie" on that - choose "AVI" format, and see how long it takes. If goes into the "hours" range, then something is really wrong with either your install, configuration, or hardware.

If that works ok, try rendering about the first 15 minutes to AVI. If that is reasonable (I think that should be around 10-20 minutes), then my suspicion is something is going wierd with your digital pictures at the end. From posts I've read around here, VMS has trouble with digital pictures that are too large. Possibly you'll have to resize these pictures.

Hello,

Well to start off, I am very new at all of this. I have been using a computer for years, I can edit photographs and use any program but when it comes to the specifics, I can't tell you very much.

My computer is:
Pentium 4 CPU 2.40GHz
2.39 GHz, 640 MB of RAM
Does that help?

I have 5.63 GB of free space left (holy smokes where did it all go) and 22.3 GB used.

This is a 2003 Dell computer.
I dont know what kind of video it is, how do I find that out?
When I click make a movie, I click burn to DVD, then it asks for video path and options but I don't see anything about rendering it to any formats (mpeg wmv etc)

The rest of the stuff you said to try, i'm sorry I don't understand the things to try in the meantime Sorry :(

Ok, it looks like the video is in Mpeg

HW power looks sufficient, though you may run into trouble with only 5.63GB of space, especially if the app is dumping temp files there too.

I realized now that you're selecting the "Burn to DVD" option in Make Movie, rather than rendering it to your Hard drive. I don't typically do this, so I'm not experienced in this path, but experience tells me that VMS is doing the whole enchilada - converting your video to MPEG-2 (which itself could take several few hours for a 1-hour video), then burning it to a DVD (which depending on the speed of your drive could take anywhere from 10 minutes, 30 minutes, etc.)

Still 15 hours seems long. Possibly it's your pictures, or the lack of space on your HD. I would still suggest doing a "Make Movie" and rendering the first 10 minutes or so to your hard drive. See how that works.

To select the first 10 minutes, place the cursor at the start of the timeline, and press the "I" key. Now place the cursor at the 10:00 point, and press the "O" key. This will set your loop region. Now select "Make Movie", save it to your hard drive option, select "Video for Windows (AVI)" for format, then check the box that says "render loop region only". Kick it off and see what happens.

I would suggest reading through the VMS manual so you learn basic concepts like rendering loop regions, shortcut keys like "I' and "O", and so forth. It will certainly help you to edit and to discuss things on this forum.

Sorry about that. I'm one of those play with it and just figure it out that way types. Well I did the in and out thing on the first 10 minutes, so far the elapsed time is 2 minutes and its at 2 % I don't think it is the pictures. I made a music video (haha or tried anyways) and it was about 3 minutes long and it took 2 and a half hours to render just so I could preview it. When I first get into the program I can view things in the bottom right hand corner pretty good but pretty quickly they start skipping and I can never watch the entire thing that I have recorded, it is annoying. I have so many programs on here (photo editing, gift card making, and video editing). Plus I have songs (itunes) pictures since i've had the computer (still haven't figured out how to properly put them on the CD and be able to use them off of it haha) and now 3 videos. Is there a such thing as buying more space? Its a 5 minutes elapsed time now and at 9 %, is that a good speed or not?
Thanks for all of your help and advice!

Seems incredibly slow. My first suspicion regarding your rendering problems is the HD space, since your CPU and RAM seem decent enough to get ok performance (I have a VAIO with 2.4GHz and 500MB RAM, and it works fine). You may want to log a support request and see if they agree that HD space is the issue, or if they have another idea. [Or maybe someone else will respond to this post.]

The easiest way to expand is to get external hard drives. I have 2.5TB across 5 external USB 2.0 hard drives (Western Digital "My Book" brands, they're pretty nice). I set VMS to dump all temp files to them as well as I write my output files to them, and I have no speed issues and also no concerns about space causing a problem.

They're pretty affordable now too - 500GB external drive typically runs about $120.

You mentioned one other problem of previews "skipping". Sometimes that is because the preview window is set to "Best (Full)", which is a high-res setting that most systems have a problem with (even systems with powerful CPU and lots of disk space). Make sure this is set to "preview (auto)", and possibly that will resolve your problem.