16:9 project encoding/burning time

Greetings! Slow learner here.

I've been burning SD 4:3 projects with my DVD SP for some time now. Shorts, commercials, and some 45- to 90-minute projects all work fine. Very few glitches working with FCP projects outputted as self-contained QT files for inputting to SP.

I'm trying to burn my first 16:9 project, which runs about 80 minutes. It's shot on a Canon XH-A1 in SD 16:9, a native format for that camera. I outputted a 30-second chunk of the finished project to verify all my format settings were OK, burned to a DVD, tested on my TV and computer and it looks fine.

Now I'm trying to burn the big project. As we speak, around 8:10 Wednesday evening, it's been "Encoding assets" for close to 11 hours on my dual-800 Mac G4. It hit about 42-percent about four hours back and seems stuck there although the progress bar is still moving.

A 4:3 project of this duration typically has taken about 5 or 6 hours to complete. The "encoding assets" readout zips up to about 33 percent in the first 30 minutes, then it crawls to about 40-some percent for a few hours, then zips through the rest.

This project crawled up to that 33 percent point in about 3 hours, then crawled the rest of the way to 42 percent where I currently sit.

Does it take THAT much longer to encode a 16:9 project? Or is something else going on here? No other changes to the SP settings, other than 5 mbps bitrate per Warmouth's Ken Stone piece on a "Bare Bones" DVD.

I'm not placing any other heavy demands on the computer at the same time, just using Word for some writing.

Any thoughts are very welcome.

Jeff Johnston

I've never encoded from DVDSP. This is not to say that there is anything wrong doing it that way, I just never do it that way. I encode first then import to DVDSP. You might try encoding using Compressor and see if that helps.