Hello, I'm a university student that jsut began editing so i'm still learning all the tricks. I have been filming a week long event and want to make a video about 45 minutes long. I've started up loading but it's extremly slow and tedious when i need 3 DVD-Rs to keep one mini-dv tape worth of avi. so i tried encoding to MPEG-2 so i could keep it on one DVD-R, but the encoding times were around ten hours! From what i've read i thought 5:1 encoding to video length was the minimum.

So my question is two fold:
1) How can i encode faster/what am i doing wrong? I am using Premiere Pro 2.0 on a P4 3.06 GHz with 448 MB of RAM

2) How should i be storing my work. I want to edit everything down so i'm concerned about compressing files before i work on them. Ideally, the video would look fine on a normal television.

Don't understand that one, what do you mean with "up loading", what type of camera do you have, dv, hdv, dvd or harddisk? Just the type of camera will do

Hi thanks for the quick response. When i say uploading i mean transfering to my computer, then burning to a DVD-R. I'm using DV.

If loading up means capture thta's allways 1:1, meaning one hour of mini-dv tape will take one hour to capture to your pc. Could you post your exportsettings? I take it that you did it directly from priemier pro. I have Premiere pro 1.5 and allways export as dv-avi and then use another dvd authoring program to convert to mpeg2.

But considering I have a pc more or less comparable with yours:
To give you an idea, I have a 3,2gig pc with 1gig of memory. When I take 1 minute of uncompressed avi which is directly captured from a camera and export that from my pc to a microsoft dv-avi file that takes 17 seconds.

If I export using the mainconcept mpeg pro plugin it takes 37 seconds, that's with variable bitrate and 1 pass.

Mind you, that is without any transitions or other effects which will lead to longer rendering times.