My adventures in DVD burning DAY 1/2

Here is my layout

2.4Ghz p4 with 512mb Ram - Window XP - integrated sound - radeon 9600
120GB western digital (master)
40GB western digital (slave)
CD-RW/r + DVD drive 48/24/48/16 (master) utmost technology
(cant find anything on UTMOST..if you know who these
guys are let me know...drive is noisey, but works/Got
at Circuit City...which I usually avoid like the plague)
memorex dual format dvd recorder dvd+- (slave) p/n 3202 3235
Memorex DVD + R 4.7GB 4x media

A great review of the Memorex was done here, so I will not go into details about it. I bought this outfit to do some home video editing and DVD making, I am sure I will leave out alot, but this is what I have accomplished so far...

Instalation of the dvd drive was easy. Directions were easy to follow, and bios/windows recognized it instantly. COLOR=red]Only question I had was on sound input, since it is a slave, do I hook my digital sound connector to the DVD drive since my CD is hooked into the analog???[/color]
Anyhow, loaded the prepackaged software ROXIO Videowave Movie Creator, Photosuite 5 se, easy cd/dvd creator.
started playing around with the software, and found that some of the programs are very similar in feel in function...I loaded up some old .avi's I had played with in windows movie maker and they loaded fine.
I found the Roxio VWMM a lot easier to deal with, although with no manual since the software is include with the DVD Drive, I found myself reading the help files a lot.
At this point I got a little too cocky. I loaded about 6GB of avi's into the editor and told it to start to render them, just to see what would happen... I was hoping it would automatically reduce the size/resolution to fit on a DVD, but it does not. It started to render, and about 3 hours later it was still going, so I went to bed.
Next day, the program was still at 97.1pct rendered with no activity on HD and not locked up, so I called it a bust. It going no where, so I canx out the job and decided to take it down a notch.
Went into ROXIO DVD BUILDER and copied off my DV camcorder. Detected it right away, and downloaded all the info(home video) right onto the hard drive, no problems.
Copied about 12 minutes worth of scenes and hit the render button then burn.
DVD Drive was REAL quiet, I didnt even know it was on without the light...kicked out the disk in about 6 minutes (including render).
Went down to my JVC DVD player and it started right up.

OPINION FROM A NOOB...

ROXIO software was pretty good. Be better if they had a .PDF manual out there which you could download. You really need one, so you are not reading help files all day long...
No errors in program or DVD, and overall it was really really simple. I am sure once I get into editing more, I will get an a medium level editor, but this bundled software is doing ok for me right now.

Hope this helped someone out there..if this is the wrong forum, I am sure the


will fix it!