Granted, I have a lot of individual cllps(30 ish) and menus(60ish) but..seems like the DVD-R takes its time moving screen to screen and to movies.
is there any optimizer function in DVDA to help this?
Or am I seeking a magic wand? ;)
Might reflect how your PC is running at the time, including how much memory is actually available for DVDA, perhaps graphics card/drivers etc...
Personally the PC I'm typing this with is now old enough to be pretty modest by today's standards, and I've not experienced any noticeable problems on larger projects.
It's a matter of physics. You can optimize your layout for moving from one clip to the next by putting the clips adjacent to each other on the DVD (and assuming the end action of the first clip is to play the second), but you can't really optimize going from clip to menu and vice-versa. Menus are (typically) all located in a single VOB, so there's no way to say place menu X physically adjacent to the end of Clip X. Further, because of the Virtual Machine that DVDA implements to handle the complex functions you may actually be moving across 2 or 3 hidden menus before you get to your visible destination.
"...you may actually be moving across 2 or 3 hidden menus..."
ONLY 2 or 3 Scott? [hee hee hee]
With DVDA I've tried splitting up the layout all sorts of ways with no help at all -- using a current project for an example, there are 30 VMG dummy menus, plus the 64 VOB 1 dummy menus, then the 7 for the title.... & it's a relatively simple design with no comps & no additional scripting.