Imovie/ Idvd

maxpower1509maxpower1509
Posted:
in Mac Software edited January 2014
Hi all,

I'm new to apple and I'm trying to learn. I have a dual cpu 1.25, 1gig ram, 160gig 8m cache hard drive & when I try using Idvd with .mp4 videos it took 2 days to encode 3 files about 500meg each. They were mpeg2 and I had to convert it. When I try using imovie it takes a life time just to import one of the 500meg files. It takes that long that I cancel it. The version's I'm using are Imovie 06 and Idvd 06. Any help would be great!!

Thanks in advance



MP

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 4
    mr. memr. me Posts: 3,221member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by MaxPower1509 View Post


    Hi all,

    I'm new to apple and I'm trying to learn. I have a dual cpu 1.25, 1gig ram, 160gig 8m cache hard drive & when I try using Idvd with .mp4 videos it took 2 days to encode 3 files about 500meg each. They were mpeg2 and I had to convert it. When I try using imovie it takes a life time just to import one of the 500meg files. ...



    You need to understand the nature of the file formats that you are using. MPEG-2 is a compressed format. MPEG-4 is a highly compressed format. The job of importing a file into iMovie is computationally intense. The movie editor is not just reading data, it is constructing each frame of your movie pixel-by-pixel. Consider this: totally decompressed, the data required to fill the screen of an NTSC DVD 24p movie is 33 MB/second or 119 GB/hour. To fit that volume of data on a 4.7 GB DVD requires tremendous computational power.
  • Reply 2 of 4
    maxpower1509maxpower1509 Posts: 4member
    Ok thanks Mr Me. Is it right to take two days?? I've since put another gig of ram in it and done another encode and it took the same time. My capture software only captures in mpg or uncompressed avi. Is there something else I can do to speed it up??
  • Reply 3 of 4
    mr. memr. me Posts: 3,221member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by MaxPower1509 View Post


    Ok thanks Mr Me. Is it right to take two days?? ...



    I don't think that right and wrong has anything to do with it. You have a tremendous volume of data that has to be decompressed and transcoded. My guess is that there are ways to speedup the process. It is currently taking you two days to do the job. Even if you can triple the import speed, then you will have reduced the time required to 16 hours. That is still a long time by some estimates.
  • Reply 4 of 4
    mikefmikef Posts: 698member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by MaxPower1509


    Is there something else I can do to speed it up??



    Although I think the process is mostly CPU bound in this case, maximizing your file I/O performance might be a consideration as well. At the very least, put the source and destination on different drives (on different IDE channels).
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