DVD encoding

hey everyone i was doing a video project for a friend and am trying to burn it to a dvd for him....now i have the whole project ready to be burned and it is encodeing the file i made. i was wondering if about a 7 hour wait for a two pass vbr at about 6.5 mbps is usual

that depends on how fast your mac is, and how much ram you have. what format are the files?

brand spakin new 17" Powerbook G4 1.5 ghz 512 ram (sucks i know and am gonna be buying a 1 gig chip asap when i have the money) 80 gig 7,200 rpm HD

The files are .mov that i exported using final cut into dvd studio pro...i've burned the cd now it just seemed a redicously long amount of time to encode...is it just that i need more ram?

well, more ram is always good, but.mov files take a while to encode sometimes.

if you're using dvd studio pro you should encode it before you import it as an asset. I've found it's typically faster.

and 7 hours seems ridiculously long, but it's dependent on how long the piece is.

Also, for your VBR you should try to set it the min and max to about 4.5 - 7.0

You had said 6.5, so I dunno if you set both the min and max to that.

just to give a little comparison, you can see me specs below, i encoded a 1:45 hour movie it was .mov 22gigs, i encoded it to 120m DVD high quality and tok about 2 hours. Long i know, but the quality is superior and talk about converting 22 GIGS into about 4 GIGs without comprimzing quality.

*i know theres a bunch of spelling mistakes but what are you ganna do about it