It's been a real pain this because it takes just over 7 hours for Nero
Vision Express to encode all the files, then it takes just over 40
minutes to burn onto a blank DL DVD+R disc.

Can't NVE burn to a VIDEO_TS folder on the hard drive? Then all you need to
do is watch it in Showtime to make sure the files are OK and burn with Nero
Express. If you make a coaster (for whatever reason) you don't have to go
through the encoding process again.


My project contains quite a lot of slides shows with background music
and 4 DV video files from MiniDV camcorder. Two of the video files are
just three minutes long, one is about 30 minutes long and the other is
1 hour and 20 minutes in length.

You might find that the video is being encoded at the maximum bitrate, which
is a problem for a lot of DVD players with DVDR media. For DV sourced
material, you won't see a benefit with the video bitrate higher than
6500kbps. If you have the time to wait for two-pass VBR, you can set the
average from 4500 to 6500kbps and it will still be impossible to see any
difference from the source material.

In the video editor part, click the "More" button and then click "Video
options". In the DVD-Video tab, change the quality setting from "Automatic"
to "Standard Play" and the Encoding mode to "High quality". If you can, you
should also change the audio to Dolby 2.0 rather than Stereo.


Do you think it will make a difference if I export all the individual
titles and bring back in again so that all the effects, texts, music,
edits etc are all within the one video file and then not creating any
chapters for the different titles?

I don't think it will make a great deal of difference - if possible, you
should always avoid rendering to an intermediate filetype before creating
your DVD.


...I am thinking perhaps having less
individual elements making this whole project up will mean less parts
of it can go wrong?

If that's an option, you might find better compatibility with single-layer
DVDR than dual. The price-per-gigabyte of dual has never come down as low as
single, so all my chargeable work has been sent out on SL discs. I've never
had a return - ever. (Well, not because of compatibility problems anyway.)
If the average bitrate needs to drop below 3000kbps in order to fit onto SL
disc, I just span the content across two discs.