"Mortimer" wrote in message
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"Stuart" wrote in message
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"Mortimer" wrote in message
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I've jsut bought myself a Dazzle Hybrid Analogue/Digital Decoder and it
comes with Pinnacle Studio 10 SmartStart. I've been experimenting with
recording a programme and then editing out the commercials.

But the time taken to render the finished project is very slow: a
45-minute project has taken about 2 hours and it's still not quite
finished. It's the "Processing frame m of n" stage which is slow.

I captured as "DVD" format of MPG (*), as opposed to DVD Long Play, or
as any other file format, and I'm rendering at 100% quality, without any
compression to make it fit onto the DVD.

I've set the rendering and VIDEO_TS folders to be on an external USB2
disk (and it *is* running at USB2 speed!) so as to lighten the load on
the system disk.

The PC is a Pentium 4 3 GHz with 512 MB RAM.


How long *should* rendering take, typically?



* Using the Pinnacle TV Centre Pro softwa it says that this is the
best format to use if you are later burning to DVD - presumably because
it requires least post-procesing during rendering.

A suggestion - increase you physical RAM to 1 gig and set your virtual
memory to a minimum and maximum of 1.5gig
Should make quite a difference to rendering time. Also don't forget to
defrag your hard drive frequently.

Thanks. Looking at Task Manager, I see that the CPU is running at 100%
during rendering and the pagefile is growing to about 800 MB from about
300 MB; also the free memory is getting a bit low - down to 50 MB at
times. So memory may well be an issue.

I'll have a look on Crucial's site and see how much an extra 512 MB would
be for this PC. Probably money well spent.

When I timed it earlier, I think I may have had the Pinnacle TV Centre
(digital TV app for grabbing to MPEG) open as well, which was probably not
very sensible!


I've just done my first big project, taking the commercial breaks out of
tonight's (repeated) episode of Lewis and burning it to DVD. It's
rendering a lot more quickly: it seems to be taking about 90 seconds to
render every 60 seconds of video, which is faster than before when it was
taking over two minutes per minute of video. Probably the fact that I
haven't got TV Centre open is making the difference.


How robust is Studio 10? I've found that it quite often crashes,
especially when I go come out of a screen for configuring a transition
such as a fade or dissolve, or when saving a modified menu. Trimming the
commercial breaks from each part (six of them) took about 20 minutes, but
I then spent another hour orting out chapters and menus because the f-ing
program kept crashing. As always, "save your wsork frequently" is always a
good motto - and save each significant change to a *different* project is
wise, in case of errors during saving which woulf cock up the project.
Once you have the downloaded or captured mpeg file you could use a whole
range of programs to top n tail and edit out commercials - there is ProjectX
( a dog of a program to get your head around but fixes timecode breaks and
other errors and IMO is the best demuxer/cleaner-upper! and basic editor)
MPEGStreamclip also free more friendly than ProjectX. Then there is Womble
or VideRedo.

I edit and demux digital TV from my Topfield 5000 using ProjectX and then
remux and do any further tidying up in Womble, spitting out a MPEG2 file
that I run into ConvertXtoDVD.

and yes when I'm burning I don't multi-task beyond reading the odd email