Why Does Burning Take Soooo Long?

[Gabrieil]

I have a 4 min film and it's taking over an hour to "prepare". My macbook pro is a 13" and was just for diagnostics and everything is fine. I burned the same film before it took less than 15 min. Why is this now a problem. It's the same film. This is ridculous! Should I return this program. It's done nothing but give me problems.

 

Even though it burnt my film beofre the quality was horrible and I also got error messages and the film was skipping all over the place. What's up this program?

[papa john]

I have the same question. I am trying to burn a 5 minute clip and it's been "finishing" for almost two hours now. I can't close it, I can't shut it down. I'm stuck in limbo. How do we get answers to this issue?

[Gabrieil]

EXACTLY! I tried again and it's been 2 hours now. I tried tweeting at roxio and have not gotten a reply. Please help or give me a refund.

[Derek Dean]

Howdy Gabriel and papa john, and welcome to the Toast 11 forum.

I'm sorry to hear that you're having difficulty with the program. I've only had it for a few months, and I'll admit that it's been challenging, but over-all I've had wonderful success with it.

 

One thing I've noticed is that Toast can be picky about certain things and how they're done. It would probably be easier for us to help you figure out the problem if you were to supply us with more information, like what operating system your using on what computer and what version of Toast you're using. Also things like what kind of files your trying to burn, etc? Are you trying to burn a CD, DVD, or Blu-ray? The more info we have, the easier is to help you.

 

When I first started burning discs with Toast, I tried burning straight to the disc, but often it would hang up during the finishing cycle, so I tried something I had read about here, and that is to create a 'Disc Image' first, and save it on my computer. The Disc Image is simply a file that works exactly like a disc, and once you made it, you can burn multiple discs from it.

 

When you have all your material in the Toast window, and you're ready to burn, instead of hitting Burn Button, go to the File menu (Top Left of Screen) and select "Save as disc image". This goes through the same procedure as burning, but saves the disc image on your computer. You open the disc image by going to Utilities menu and selecting "Mount Disc Image". Then use either the Mac DVD player, or the Toast/Roxio Player and check out the Disc image to see how it looks. When you're finished, you have to "Unmount" the disc image, just like a DVD, so you have to eject it. There are several ways to do that. You can go to the Finder and you'll see it listed with all the hard drives on your computer, simply click the eject button next to the name. Or, you can use the Triangle shaped Eject button at the top right of your computer screen, or you can simply drag the disc Icon to towards your Trash Can (which will turn into and eject button) and eject it that way.

 

The cool thing about using a disc image is that it lets you preview exactly how the DVD will look, and if there are any problems, you can fix them BEFORE wasting a disc. If everything works ok, then simply burn the Disc Image. You do this with Toast by opening up the program and Selecting COPY, then Image Copy. Then select the Disc Image and burn it. I usually burn the first copy to a DVD-RW, just to check things out, and if it looks good I'll go ahead and burn a regular disc.

 

It may seem like a lot of work, but since I've started following this procedure I've had 100% good burns.

 

Anyway, there are a few other folks here that are VERY knowledgeable about Toast (and VERY helpful as well), and if you leave some more info about your situation I'll bet they'll chime in and give you a hand.

[Gabrieil]

Thank you sooo much Derek Dean! I will try this and keep you posted. Much obliged!

[papa john]

I may have discovered the reason for the slow "finishing". It appears to have something to do with the type of DVD we're using. My first tries were with DVD-R disks. When I recorded a two hour tape on DVD-RW, it finished within three minutes. (I can't cheap out on the disks.) So, I'm kind of happy with it. The only limitation I am not "happy" with is that it only records for two hours. Oh, it will run over for about 15 minutes but anything after two hours locks up the DVD on playback. So as long as the movie is less than two hours, it works just fine. You have to use the lowest qualitiy setting but the difference is difficult to see. To work around this problem, I recorded my 2 hour and 15 minute movie on two disks and then recorded them onto a single disk from one DVD player to another. I know this is a jerry-rig process at best and the splice is obvious but it suits my purposes.

[Gabrieil]

When I slect COPY in the final step where is the "Image Copy" command? I'm also confused because when I "eject" or "unmount" inToast my movie is taken out of the COPY tab. What's being copied/burned. Please help...

[Gabrieil]

Also why does Disc Cover 3 RE NOT Open up?? All the others do? Why is Toast so problematic? I have Mac OS 10.7 and 2Gigs of RAM and over 125 Gigs of space remaining. What's up with this?

[bohalloran]

Try opening the app itself instead of from the menu in toast. The app is contained within the toast folder in the applications folder of your HD.

[Derek Dean]

Howdy Garbrieil,

When you first open Toast, it brings up a big dialog box on your screen that says "Select a Project to get started". At the top of the box it has 6 buttons listed as, "Tutorials-Data-Audio-Video-Copy-Convert". Click COPY. The box will change giving you two selections, either DISC COPY or IMAGE FILE. Click on IMAGE FILE which will highlight that box blue, the click FINISH in the lower right corner of the box. That brings up the regular Toast File Box. Click on the SELECT button and a Finder box pops up, use it to navigate to the DISC IMAGE. Click on the Disc Image (which highlights it), then click the OPEN button in the bottom right corner. That should load the Disc Image into the Toast file box. Then simply make sure you have a disc loaded, set your RECORDER SETTINGS, and finally, click the COPY Buttons in the bottom right corner.

 

The way I learned to do this stuff was to read the manual. It's VERY extensive (about 134 pages) and covers most things you might want to do with Toast. I found the manual by opening Toast, going to the HELP menu at the top of the screen, and selecting Toast Help. It opened a .pdf Toast manual.

 

EDIT: If you have trouble locating the manual, let me know and I'll e-mail you a copy. It's very well written and something I refer to often.