I am in the process of putting a bunch of files onto DVD and notice that it is a rather slow process of preparing first and then burning the DVD (the burning is pretty quick though). I was just wondering if the upgrade to v4 of Arch is faster than previous version - or is it just the nature of the beast that it takes time with the rendering and processing of the files to a smaller size for DVD use...

If you render your video to a DVD Architect compatible MPEG-2 format in Vegas, the "prepare" phase will only take seconds. Otherwise, the preparation must re-render the whole file, and it's possible that you will have two layers of compression (AVI? followed by MPEG-2).

That's true for DVD Architect 4.5 anyway. Probably true for 3 as well.