Hi, I'm a new user here, I just returned from a european vacation where I shot a lot of video with my Canon Optura Pi set in 16:9 wide screen mode.
I've managed to transfer the portions of the video that I want to keep via firewire into Premiere 6.2 and assemble it as a "movie". However, when I attempt to export it as a .avi @ 720 x 480, Premier tells me it will take "about a day". If I bite the bullet and go for it, all seems to be progressing well until sometime after the 10-12 hour mark when the system locks up with plenty of hard drive capacity left.
I've also tried importing the same DVavi video clips (about 20 of them totalling approx 10 gigs) into the copy of MyDVD that came with my Sony DVD burner. When I try to setup a DVD project it tells me that it will take about 40 minutes to render but again it locks up on the hourglass symbol half way through the process???
Is this a problem with trying to use 16:9 video?
Can any one else help out here?

My system specs:

Pentium 4-2.4G
512 Ram
Asus MB
60G Seagate Barracuda application hard drive
170G SCSI Seagate Barracuda video storage drive
Win XP Pro SP1
Matrox G550 vieo card + 2 monitors

Preface/warning: I'm a novice who has only sporadic time to work on my video projects.

As far as the 16:9, I'm assuming that you're using the lite version of MyDVD bundled with the Sony burner (I have the Sony DRU-500 so used the same software, as well as the bundled lite version of "DVDit!" that I think was bundled with Premiere 6.x). These lite programs simply won't do widescreen--it is disabled in the bundled version. And they gave me all kinds of grief, in the vein of "you get what you pay for."

So I don't think that you're going to get 16:9 output (except **maybe** letterboxed with lite DVDit???) without buying new authoring software.

FWIW, my interest in 16:9 pushed me to drop the cash for Adobe Video Collection. Despite reports of bugs by others on the forum(what software doesn't have some?) I've been VERY happy, not only with Encore itself, but the entire collection. A bit of a learning curve, especially with After Effects, but worth the effort. Vegas+DVD fans seem pretty happy with that suite as well, from what I can see in the forum.

On the locking/crashing...
Depending on how long your video is and how complicated the effects and editing are, it could well take overnight or more to render. I've got a pretty speedy system (3.0GHz, 1GB fast DDR RAM) and it took over half an hour last night to transcode and burn a fairly simple (but high bit rate) 6 minute video to disc directly from Premiere Pro. So if you were actually working with 10-20 GB worth of material on a long and/or complex timeline, it sure could take a day.

The locking...if you're rendering to an AVI, I don't have any good ideas, maybe just guesses about power management, screen savers, utility programs conflicting? Ought to work.

I found MyDVD Lite (and DVDit! Lite, too) to be pretty buggy and fussy about the files it handles, so it isn't too surprising that you're having problems with it, honestly. The only specific idea I have about the myDVD locking is if you tried to import more than will fit on a disc, the program might have gone tilt. Otherwise, probably not able to help much.

If you provide some more information about the size of your renders, codec used, and any other details on the system problems, someone with more experience may be able to provide more info.

Basically it just shouldn't lock up at all. You might perhaps try
smaller portions and then assemble those together. Most DVD's
can make one long movie from multiple segments without too
much trouble.

Keep in mind that your authoring application must support 16:9
widescreen (as must your MPEG2 encoder!) to get it correctly
on DVD.

Why not render to MPEG2 for DVD directly from Premiere? See
if that works.