Should It Take 10+ Hours To Burn A Playable Dvd?

[Clarence Worley]

I am using Toast 11 on a MacBookPro 2.6GHz, Intel Core i7 with 16 MHz DDR3.

 

I am burning playable DVDs on my USB Apple Superdrive.

 

The dvd's have 2 feature films on them, and so it pretty much fills up 4+gigs. But they take 9-12+ hours to burn a dvd. Is this normal?? It seems so long.

 

At first I burned it on "Best" setting, then I did "16x" and I think that took even longer.

 

Bonus question, with these specs, think its ok to use Photoshop and stuff while burning a DVD? I tend not to just to be safe, but I thought I'd ask while I'm at it. Thanks in advance!

[tsantee]

Last question first: Yes it should be okay to use other apps when Toast is doing its encoding and writing. I presume you've maxed out the RAM on your MBP. Your Mac may get a bit warm with the processor working hard with Photoshop as well as the encoding so I'd be cautious about prolonged use of processor-intensive apps.

 

As for the time the encoding requires it sounds to me that your source videos are HD resolution. Toast has to strip a lot of pixels out of those videos to make it standard definition for video DVD. If your source files were SD to begin with you'd see much faster encoding. You might experiment by having Toast convert the video using the DV 16:9 conversion setting and then using that as the source for making the video DVD. That may be a faster way to go (although the DV file will be very large so you need lots of hard drive space).