Here are some answers to your questions:

> 1. Is the output of the rendering process an AVI file or an MPEG2 file?

It depends on how you will author the DVD. A DVD requires an MPEG2 file. Screenblast ships with MyDVD which wants to encode the DVD file for you so, by default, Screenblast will render an AVI file to input into MyDVD which will then render an MPEG2 file. If you use another DVD authoring tool, I would output an MPEG2 file and eliminate one render step. This also saves on disk space.

> 2. I gather the rendering process takes quite a bit of time. Approximately how long would it take to render a one-hour project, for example?

It depends on how many FX’s, titles, transitions, etc. are in that one hour and what format you are rendering to. Each title and transition needs to be processed and rendered. Each Video FX will cause that event to be processed and rendered.

If most of your video does not have FX’s applied and the video source is a DV AVI file and the rendering target is to a DV AVI file, the render will go quick. In fact, Screenblast will just copy unaltered video from source to target so it’s limited by how fast your hard drives can copy.

If you are rendering an AVI to MPEG2, then every frame has to be converted to MPEG2 so the rendering will be slow. An average computer (i.e., 2.0Ghz) will take between 2x and 3x to encode to MPEG2. So a one hour video would take up to three (3) hours to render. My P4 3.0Ghz takes about 1.5x so a one hour video takes about one and a half hours without FX, transitions or title rendering taken into account. You could easily see 5+ hour or more render times depending on how complex your project is. Just render overnight.

> 3. Does the rendering process generate a new file including all of the video clips, audio clips, still photos, and other files that were used in making up the project? If so, that could be a pretty larger file, which of course would require a lot of hard disk space - perhaps as much as the video files that were downloaded from the video camera. Is that correct?

Yes, that’s correct. Everything on the timeline is rendered out as one big file. If you are rendering to a DV AVI file, then DV takes up 13GB per hour. You will need 26GB of hard drive space to hold your two hour project (not including temp space needed while rendering). If, however, you render to MPEG2 (which is 25:1 compression instead of 5:1 like DV) the files will be much smaller. A 2 hour DV quality MPEG2 file will be around 5-6GB. (hint: you will need to reduce your quality to get 2-houirs on one DVD. You might want to make two one hour DVD’s.)

> 4. With respect to the DVD authoring process, will this require generating yet another new file of the same size? I’m starting to worry about hard disk space. And does authoring require another lengthy operation (time-wise)?

No, the MPEG2 file that the DVD application creates is smaller (approximate 1/5th the size) If you render to AVI from Screenblast to feed into a DVD authoring application, then it will need to render to MPEG2 file. If you render to an MPEG2 file from Screenblast, the DVD authoring program only has to render the menus and copy the MPEG2 to VOB files. This should only maybe 20 minutes depending on if you have moving menus, etc. This is why I render to an MPEG2 right from Vegas and feed that into DVD Architect. (I don’t use Screenblast but did use VideoFactory). Then you have to physically burn it to the disk. Obviously this is dependent on whether you have a 1x, 2x or 4x DVD burner.

~jr