why does rendering take SO LONG

greenspleen wrote on 2/15/2005, 8:42 PM
hey, i'm new here. i got DVD architect a while ago, i've been using and i've loved it for things like making photo albums and mpeg compilations for familys and friends... some of the projects have been huge and others have been small, but most of them have always taken not that long to render and burn.

my mom made me download "desperate housewives" episodes and wanted me to make a menu and im putting 5 episodes on each disc (3 total).

it takes SO LONG for this file to render. it's a 4.2GB DVD, and i'm formatting it to have surround sound and be widescreen. but still... i didn't think it would take DAYS to close to a week to render... i think i might be doing something wrong.

any ideas or help for this troubled newbie?

thanks so much. :-)

Comments

ScottW wrote on 2/16/2005, 5:03 AM
What speed is your processor? You say you downloaded this material - what format is it in? If it's something like DiVX then expect some long times rendering, since DVDA must first decompress the data and then recompress it as mpeg2.

Your system configuration is going to be a facotr as well. Rendering/encoding is a processor intensive task, it also requires lots of disk I/O, so if you have a slow processor and/or slow disk, that's going to contribute to long render times.
greenspleen wrote on 2/16/2005, 7:59 AM
i've got an intel pentium 4 processor... i think i have 640MB of ram, a 60GB harddrive...

all of the files are mpegs that are around 370MB-380MB. they all open with windows media player. but it's not the video rendering that takes a long time. in fact, whenever it hits the audio rendering of the second file, it stalls at 0% and then says its going to take 11,000 hours or something.

i've done DVDs with picture compliations and music compilations and small videos within them, and it never took this long...

thanks for replying. i just don't understand what's goin on.
ScottW wrote on 2/16/2005, 8:45 AM
You still didn't say what format the stuff was in. There's lots of formats. If this is an AVI file, download a copy of Gspot and it will tell you exactly what's in the AVI file. It may be that DVDA simply can't handle the audio in the format it is in - so you may need to use some other tool to extract the adio and feed it to DVDA as a seperate WAV of AC3 file.
greenspleen wrote on 2/16/2005, 9:44 AM
Size = 350MB
Type = OpenDML AVI
IMRR = 1.00
I/L = 1 vid frame (42 ms), p=360 Split: No
ScottW wrote on 2/16/2005, 10:43 AM
It should also tell you what codec is used for the video and audio.
greenspleen wrote on 2/16/2005, 12:07 PM
Video Codec:

4CC = xvid
Name = XviD
Stat: 2 compatible codecs installed (more info...)

Runtime: 42:39 (61,345 fr)
x:y = 624x352 (1.77:1) [39:22]
Bitrate = 1007 kb/s
FPS = 23.976
Qf = .191 bits/pixel


Audio

Stream 1

Codec

Name = 0x0055(MP3) ID'd as MPEG-1 Layer 3
Stat = 2 compatible codecs installed
Bitrate = 133 kb/s (66/ch, stereo) VBR
Fs = 48000 Hz
ScottW wrote on 2/17/2005, 2:39 PM
Well, if I had to guess, I'd guess there's something about the mpeg-1 audio stream that's bothering DVDA. Probably your best best will be to use something like VitualDub to transcode to a different format.
John_Cline wrote on 2/18/2005, 9:51 PM
The problem is the format of the source files, they are compressed using the XviD codec and they are 624x352 at 23.976 frames per second. DVDA is having to decompress, the video, resize it to 720x480 and convert the frame rate to 29.97 and then compress it to DVD compatible MPEG2 format. All this is going to take a LOT of render time. Also, 5 hours of material on the DVD is going to require such a low bitrate that the DVD is going to end up looking awful anyway. I'd say it's hardly worth the effort.

John
Edin1 wrote on 2/19/2005, 6:19 PM
He could set the frame rate to 23.976 in DVDA. And I don't know if changing resolution to 704x480 instead of 720x480 will make any difference, and by how much.
5 hours on one DVD isn't awful, but it is going to have low quality (about 1.9Mbps average bitrate). Since we are talking about a not-so-high quality source (although XviD at 1Mbps looks good), and most probably progressive frames, as well as 24 of them instead of 30, the 1.9Mbps bitrate may just do it for him (or his mother). I had 720x480, 29.97fps, interlaced video compressed into 3.2Mbps MPEG-2, and it still looks OK.
He should try and see if he or his mother will be satisfied with the quality.

I would suggest him to decompress the video and audio first, and then encode them into DVD-compatible MPEG-2.
WannabeGreat wrote on 2/23/2005, 2:01 PM
Jez:

I hope you are learning from that experience.
Can you just re-record this movie, or something on a
rerun, or borrow a copy on VHS and start with that?

However, I've used DVD Workshop to produce the
DVD's however, before I even go there I make sure
that my source files are first "built" to the DVD format.

I'm not into frame rates I just use the default settings
in Video Vegas or other program and make sure that
all my source files that the DVD authoring tool is
going to use are the same - in order to avoid the
DVD authoring tool's requirement to re-render the
entire video production that you just spent hours
rendering in Vegas or other program.

Hummm?