Quickest way to burn 40 dvds
 

Hello,
So, I was informed a few days ago that it will in fact take about 3 hours to burn one dvd. I need to burn 40 dvds and was wondering if there is a way to do a bulk burn on dvd studio pro 4 where it could just compress the video (which seems to take most of the time) once and then burn multiple copies. Is this possible? Any other way that would make this go faster would be apreciated too.

Thanks
Drew

Well I don't use DVDSP, but if you make one DVD you can make an image file from it and then burn as many copies as you like. Find the "Disk Utility" program that comes with OSX - should be in the Utilities folder inside the Applications folder. Start it up, go to the help menu and read the section on disk images. Very simple. First you need to create the image which takes a few minutes, but burning copies only takes a few minutes each after that and certainly not 3 hours!

However, 40 copies is still a lot. You might want to investigate commerical disk copy services. If nothing else it will save wear and tear on your DVD drive...

I agree, commercial services or a duplicator are your best bets.
However, I find it odd that it's taking 3 hours per disc - usually the first one will take long, but once it's encoded, the other ones should take a few minutes each.

Or Buy a Duplicator
 

I purchasd a duplicator with 5 dual layer burners and a hard drive. You upload the disk to the duplicator hard drive, and burn five at a time. I could burn about 40 in an hour and a half. This set up ran about $ 800.00 with shipping. You can get units with a lot more drawers. There are other robotic units that burn one at a time, and stack up to 50 at a time. There are also ones that print at the same time. Its something to consider if you are going to do it a lot.

Chris Barcellos

What are you buring with
 

Also, Drew, what program are you burning with. Don't really know DVD Pro, but It sounds like your program is going through the encoding process each time. There has to be a setting that allows you to create the disk image and then burn from there. Also, is this dual layer, or single layer.

Chris Barcellos

The reason the first DVD takes so long to prepare is that the video has to be encoded (to MPEG-2) and then authored to DVD spec (menus and whatnot). This only need be done once. The actual burning only takes a few minutes.

DVD SP4 allows you to create a disc image rather than burn a single DVD. The encoding to MPEG2 is what takes the long time. If you make a disc image forst, all of your encoding will be done for good and you can burn as many copies as you need.