slow conversions from Elgato to imovie to toast

Please help! What can I do to speed up the process of copying shows? I have a Macbook Pro, with a 2.4 Ghz core 2 duo processor. I just purchased the elgato video capture kit to record some train shows off of my DVR for my son. I record them in realtime, and hit the key to export them to imovie. I use imovie to edit out the commercials, then export them to Toast, where I burn them to a DVD. My problem is the time involved. Elgato takes 10 -15 minutes to export a 1 hour show. I movie takes 10 minutes to import it, and 25 or more to export the 42 minute program after edits. Toast takes a long time to import it before burning at average quality.
I recently upgraded my macbook to snow leopard and iwork/ilife 09. Last christmas I bumped up to 4 gig of ram. (both before starting this project) I use Istat on my dashboard and it shows almost 90% processor use while doing this. Is there a setting I can change that will still result in a product which can be viewed on a decent sized tv? I don't need HD or near HD quality, just smoothness.
Any help is appreciated.

I can't believe that I have stumped the forum.

Your question doesn't make much sense. You are converting the output from iMovie to be eventually placed onto a DVD. If you reduce the quality it will look worse on most any TV. All of the times are realistic. Your work flow sounds fine.

If you really want to muck around, then the only place I can see it is in the iMovie export quality by altering the video data via the QuickTime export option. Toast likely also has some settings for making the DVD files. Again, doing that will reduce quality. The question is, does it matter that much. Only you can tell since it takes a look to see the results. In the end, you likely won't save too much time.

That's really all I was looking for - was I missing some obvious step. Sounds like I wasn't, so thanks for the answer.