iMovie to VCD: Is there a Faster Way?

[jove]

Hello,

In order to send videos to family, I am packaging movies as VCDs (Video CDs). For a fifteen minute movie, the total time was about 4 hours!

iMovie to "CDROM Medium" quality - 1.5 hours
Toast Titanium encoding to VCD compatible format - 2.5 hours
The actual burn process to a minute

Is there a way to export from iMovie where Toast simply grabs data, as opposed to re-encoding and formating it? Or any other options?

 

[neutrino23]

Simple, but unfortunate, answer is to use faster computers. It's just a guess but I'll bet you could cut the encoding time by a factor of five with the newest G4.

Some comparable measurements.

My Pismo 500 encodes MP3s with iTunes at just under 4x. Someone posted that their new G4 did it in just under 12x.

Once you're experienced at doing this you could just let it run overnight. If Toast is scriptable you could write a simple script to tell Toast to encode the file once it was prepared by iMovie. If you start the iMovie export at 9:00PM, tell iDo Script Scheduler (free from Apple's Apple Script page) to launch your script well after the file should be ready, maybe 2:00AM. This doesn't run any faster but it is less painful.