i ordered verbatim DL DVD+R's and did a test burn of 6.45 gig, it tooks 35 mins to burn and almost as long to verify, that means if i shot 3 hrs of footage id be burning dvd's for 6 hours all day. is there any other way to burn discs, are there faster dvd-rs that are safe?

Are you burning using an external or internal writer?

internal on my macbook pro 2.4
MATSHITA DVD-R UJ-857E:

Adam, that seems to be about the right speed. I'm using the same disks in my Dual 2.3GHz G5 Mac with Pioneer 109 drive.

Actually those 2.4x DL-DVD's supposedly burn at up to 6x and Toast seems to be reporting around 5x or so.

You might get faster speeds if you use single layer DVDs. You'd have to use the Sony Clip Browser to split the BPAV into 4GB chunks (which is really easy).

Adam, that seems to be about the right speed. I'm using the same disks in my Dual 2.3GHz G5 Mac with Pioneer 109 drive.

Actually those 2.4x DL-DVD's supposedly burn at up to 6x and Toast seems to be reporting around 5x or so.

You might get faster speeds if you use single layer DVDs. You'd have to use the Sony Clip Browser to split the BPAV into 4GB chunks (which is really easy).

so how is that done, lets say i have an 8 gig file, how do you split it, and does it connect flawlessly or do you lose frames?

The Sony Clip Browser has a "split" function. You select the card and designate the size you want it split to and it splits the BPAV into the sizes creating new metadata. I've done this for 16GB card that I back up on to two DL-DVDs. The button that does this, actually looks like a little DVD (or stack of DVDs?). I set the split to 8GB but you can certainly set it to 4GB for standard DVDs.