idvd 5 vs. idvd 4

hi, i am newly working with idvd 5 on a powerbook g4 and have worked with idvd 4 on my desktop g4. Is it true to say that idvd 5 renders the menus and movies every time you burn the disk (if you don't do it continuously) where idvd 4 somehow saves those settings, saving a bunch of time?

I mean, the new idvd has been taking 4 hours to write and burn dvds!!!! this is unreal to me - where I have been burning dvds (and yes, I realize I was working on a faster machine) that took under 1 hour. It didn't go through every menu and process every transition in the same way that idvd 5 seems to do.

can someone set me straight or shed some light? is there some setting i can change? or should i go back to idvd 4????

thanks much!

Encoding the menus of a DVD is a very processor intensive process and you will see huge differences when going between those two computers. iDVD 4 & 5 render every frame of the menu (30 per second) before burning the DVD.

iDVD 5 has the option of making a disk image of your movie so that you can burn as many times as you want without having to encode each time. Simply hit "Shift+Command+R" to save as a disk image. I believe iDVD 4 simply gave a prompt saying "Would you like to burn another DVD?" (or something like that).

So, the time difference you're seeing in the two machines should be expected. Unless your PowerMac has a slower processor than your Powerbook...

I think you should try iDVD 5 on your PowerMac (if possible) and see if it takes the same amount of time to burn a disk. If it does then I would suggest going back to iDVD 4 if you feel it performs better.

Thanks much - I'll try it out and repost later today...