Hey folks, pretty new to this, and have just finished encoding/burning my first DVD. Thanks for the help on my first post to get me this far. Final result was pretty good, so quite happy but just had a quick question.

I used avi2dvd with QuEnc selected as the decoder with 1 pass. Avi file was approx 716M and took over 3 hrs to encode. My CPU was also running at almost 100% the whole time. Is this normal? I have a P4 3.2 processor and 1G RAM.

Or can anyone suggest a quicker and less resource intensive way of doing it? Happy to encode overnight, but if my system is running at full tilt the whole time, am a little worried at how that affects things in the long run.

Thanks all, great forum by the way...

Hey culain,

Yes, this normal, video encoding is very CPU intensive and takes a while to perform. Professionals usually have a high-end, dual CPU (Intel Xeon) PC or G5 Mac workstations to speed up video encoding. You may want to avoid using it while encoding video, and make sure you turn off all background tasks. As long as your CPU has proper cooling, running hours-to-days at 100% is okay.

to add to what Ender.Wiggin has posted.

disable screen savers.

Main Concept I find a much better programme speed wise, What TMPGEnc takes 9 hours or more to do it can do in anywhere between 1.5 and 4 hours. My system is not exactly new, Athlon XP2000+ (1.67GHz) and 512Mb DDR memoery. Sometimes I ave to resort to TMPGEnc to get ound syncs right on somethings, and that I have to leave over night. Guve Main Concept a try there is a trial version on their site just google search for "Main Cioncept MPEG Encoder".

Or if you can get hold of Cinema Craft Encoder its even better. On my poor Athlon XP 1800 it encodes files at 1.2X (60 minutes movie encoded in about 50 Minutes). Quality is great too.

I have Tmpgenc plus, cce/sp 2.5, and Mainconcept. Mainconcept is definitely the fastest and IMO you won't see any difference in the quality.

Ok I understand that encoding takes time. I'm using magix movie edit pro 14 to do my movies. I I have put a DVD together with a dozen of separeted clips. It took 17 hours to encode a 6 minutes clips and now it's on to the second clip wich is about 16 minutes long and has been encoding for 61hors all together. Is this normal or what. I wrote to magix support but no answer. I was wondering instead of burning it to DVD if I should not create an image first on my hard drive. I don't see why it would be different but doesn't hurt to ask. Might be something I don't know. What do you guys think? Oh yeah the whole dvd I'm trying to burn is about 4.2gb

Martin

17hrs to encode 6minutes is outrageously long!

How many different clips are you trying to put into this dvd? If you only have 8 or fewer titles to put into it, you can use FAVC. http://favcfavc.googlepages.com/ It is free and works very well with the HC encoder that is included. Highly recommend free program.

DVDFlick is another free option that I suggest you look into, though I'm not sure how many separate videos it can take as input.