Marty M. said:
Could you read my post to John Kelly on 12/20 and give me your thougthts
on
file size, DV-AVI save times, and burn times. Thanks.
The one about the Celeron? If so, I think John addressed
all the likely culprits. I just did a ~27-minute piece on a
2.4GHz P4*, and it took about an hour to save the segments
down to DV-AVI, about an hour to encode for DVD (using
Roxio's DVD Builder), and about 5 minutes for each DVD
burned. Your times were longer, as I recall, but not outside
the range of normal, given that your PC has a just-over-1GHz
Celeron, and probably a slower front side bus speed and
perhaps not quite the optimal amount of RAM for doing
longish video projects, at least to the extent of doing your
projects any quicker than you described.
As John explained, the processor speed is only a small
piece to the puzzle. The fact that the Celerons generally
have less L2 cache is one piece; amount of RAM and
front side bus (FSB) speed are two larger pieces... as
is disk speed (though it's safe to assume you'd be okay
with normal, run-of-the-mill 7200 rpm EIDE drives), and
disk condition (i.e., how fragmented is the drive?).
The lengthy part of the process is always going to be
the encoding step prior to the first burn. I could be wrong,
but I'm guessing that in that step, the PC has to hold a
LOT of crap in RAM, so your memory is more than likely
going to get maxed out in this step. Is that your bottleneck?
I don't know -- if you have less than 512MB, step up to
that much, if you can, and see what effect that has on
speeding up the process. You'll need to get specs on
your motherboard in order to see how much RAM can
be installed, in what configurations (one stick at a time,
vs. matching pairs) and what "speed" or latency it must
be. Still, if the motherboard is only capable of 100MHz
FSB, that's going to be another bottleneck -- one that
really can't be solved without building another PC. :-/
Anyway, I think I may have repeated nearly everything
John already mentioned, so forgive me if it was of little
or no help.
* - This was a friend's PC, since my ancient P3 800MHz
box had fried its little CPU. I don't know the specs on it --
it's a off-the-shelf Dell, so not sure what the FSB or even
the installed RAM was.
..