DVD Burning & Multitasking in OS X 10.4

Okay, so I do quite a bit of video on my Dell PC using Premiere Pro 2.0 or Vegas 6. I was trying to use iMovie and iDVD for some quick simple editing of some 2 hour videos and then burning on to DVD.

My two questions are:

1 - Is it me or does it take forever long to burn video to a DVD using iDVD? Not only that, but just to render a iPhoto slideshow of about 100 pictures with basic Ken effects. It would take maybe 10-15 minutes at the most to burn something like this on ProShow Gold or Premiere on my PC. It takes well over 30 minutes on my Mac.

2 - Is there any way to do anything else on the MAC while rendering? So far, I have had to just let it run and not be able to even look at other pictures, etc, while the Mac is burning to DVD or rendering. On my PC, I could burn a 2 hr. video and print labels and inserts for my DVD's and DVD Case while it's rendering and burning. Much more convenient. I mean, I know I wouldn't edit in photoshop or some memory hogging software while burning, but I have printed stuff from PS2 and my label making software. All has been well so far.

My MacBook Pro has 2 gb RAM and 160gb harddrive.

Thanks.

I think the DVD burning might be slow because the drive is slower. Usually laptop optical drives aren't as fast as the ones in desktop PC's because of battery life and such.

I do find that rendering to .mov takes an age compared to other programs rendering to mpg or avi on the same machine. You could try tweaking your project option in iDVD if you don't necessarily want absolute top whack quality. One thing I would like it the ability to switch renderer and to render the video and audio together. ffmpeg can render a complete DVD quality mpeg in the time it takes iDVD to sort out just the video, then there's the audio and multiplexing on top of that!

Yes, that's exactly right about it doing the video and audio separately and taking forever.

Okay, so what if I connect an external DVD burner to burn my DVD's? Could that possibly help.