Help, Doe Encoding Always Take This Long?

[anneisom]

I'm making a VCD for my daughter's orphanage group and the 1 hour iMovie is taking a VERY Long time to burn. Its been encoding for about 12 hours and is only 1/3 the way through. Is there something wrong, or is this normal? I am running OSX 10.3.9 and I only have 18.3 GB of memory left.

 

Please help me, this is supposed to be on a plane on Friday!

 

Anne

[tsantee]

That does sound like a very long time.

 

If your Mac has a G3 rather than a G4 processor then that could explain the time it is taking. The next time you do this I suggest choosing Save as Disc Image from the Toast File menu rather than clicking the burn button. That way if anything goes wrong during the disc burning you'll still have the image file on your hard drive and won't need to re-encode. After the disc image is written you burn it to disc using the Image File setting in the Toast Copy window.

 

If you are concerned that the encoding has frozen you can check it by opening the Roxio Converted Items folder in your Documents folder. When you choose list view you'll see the file's date and time. If after leaving the folder and returning and clicking once on the file(s) in the folder the time isn't updated for at least one of the files, the encoding has frozen. You can cancel the encoding by clicking the small x at the end of the progress bar in Toast.

 

Let me know if you need more assistance with this.

[debrast]

If after leaving the folder and returning and clicking once on the file(s) in the folder the time isn't updated for at least one of the files, the encoding has frozen.

Actually, I'm having the same problem with a similar setup...however, I tried what you said (above) and it seems that the time on the folder actually stays the same, but the file size changes. Just wanted to let you know. Hope that helps. Mine has been at it for a few hours. I read in the Toast Help files that encoding can take up to three minutes for every 1 minute of tape...

[anneisom]

My Mac is a G4, and I've had problems with my iMovie slowing down also. My husband has always used PC's and suggested a defrag, but everything I've read said that you can't do that on a Mac. So, I press on. I checked my documents folder and the last date and time was today at 10:07, so its still chugging away.

 

Anne

[tsantee]

My Mac is a G4, and I've had problems with my iMovie slowing down also. My husband has always used PC's and suggested a defrag, but everything I've read said that you can't do that on a Mac. So, I press on. I checked my documents folder and the last date and time was today at 10:07, so its still chugging away.

 

Anne

Something is wrong then.

 

When this project is complete you should repair permissions with Disk Utility. Also the Mac OS does some cache cleaning at about 2 a.m. every day if it isn't asleep. Most Mac's, however, are set to sleep when not in use. So applications such as Cocktail, Macaroni are available to automate those maintenance functions at other times.

 

Lastly, it may be good for you to run DiskWarrior if you have it.