DVD authoring
 

So, I am new to dvd authoring and am starting with iDVD, I am using FCP 5 and idvd 3 and when I try to burn an hour long clip it says that it is going to take 200 minutes, is this right? I did not compress the video, just exported it as a self contained movie from FCP, What steps should I take in between exporting and burning? Or is it just going to take 200 minutes? and help would be much apreciated,

thanks
Drew

what type of mac are you running?
dvd encoding varies from 2/3x to 1/4x realtime, depending on the system hardware and compression settings, unless you have a fancy pants realtime mpeg-2 encoder card.

exporting as a self contained movie is probably the only way you can get your completed edit from fcp to idvd as idvd doesnt support movies rendered by compressor.

I am running a 1ghz pb w/ 768 MB of RAM

Sounds about right to me...given the system you are using (PB) you should expect it to take at least a few hours to encode an hour long clip. You suggested perhaps pre-encoding it in another app before dropping it into iDVD, but I am pretty sure that you can't do that with iDVD 3 and would likely require DVD Studio Pro to do it properly on your sytem. iDVD 3 will only be able to work with the full quality dv file that you have as the app requires that it does its own encoding before the burn.

Even if you have it set to burn at the fastest speed of the drive, the burning only happens at the end. The encoding is what takes a long time and even with the size of RAM you are using, I think the numbers you are seeing are accurate.
-Jon