I am new to video editing and to be fair think I have done pretty well on my first little project.
I have just got married in cuba and have loads of photos and video footage to edit together to produce a dvd. I have chosen photos and video and linked them together with titles,video effects and transitions. The dvd last approximately half an hour.

The problem I have is that on my final dvd the transition between still photos and even a few of the photos themselves are a bit jumpy. Any ideas?

I've tried a few different ways, here's what I did. Firstly I tried exporting the video as an avi file which took 8 hours to do(is this right?)

The converted it with dvd santa to vob file and burnt it through nero.

The other way I did it was to use adobe mpeg encoder.(which only took an hour)-Why the difference?

And burnt it through nero again. PLease please please help.

It will probaly help if we knew a bit more about what you're editing in. Somebody might be able to point you straight to a solution with the editing package.

There's lots of reasons why rendering can take a long time (8hrs for 30mins is poor). It could be your computer doesn't have suffcient processing power (that could also be the cause of your problem - just a guess) or the complexity of your editing commands. There's no reason to use all the transtions available. Professionals hardly use any at all.

You mentioned Adobe mpeg encoder. Are you using premiere which has the encoder in it? if so that's proably the best thing to do and let Nero do the rest.

Personally I'd find a half hour video a bit hard going. Consider making shorter clips and using the menu in Nero to select what you want to see. You'll probably find it more pleasing to skip to what interests you at the time especially if you're showing someone else who might be polite but actually be bored.

Good luck

Ye sorry I am using Adobe premier 6.5. I am using a pentium 4 3.2 gig with 2 gig of ram. Most of the half hour is taken up by the wedding video and clips of excursions etc and the photos to accompany them. I have taken as much out as possible.
Thank you in advance for your help.

Sounds like you should have plenty of processing power (if you don't have separate graphics card it's worth having one and dont rely upon the one in your motherboard).
Export your finished video through Premiere's own mpeg encoder that's in the editing package that you're already using. Make sure you have the multiplex setting correct and export it as mpeg 2. Provided you're not changing the frames in the motion effect and you have the interlacing on I can't see that you should have much of a problem - Sorry, that's not to say you don't have one, it's just that you shouldn't have one. It should render in about 20/30 minutes if you haven't over-cooked the editing commands.
Nero works well if you import the Mpeg2 it will do everything for you. You probably don't want to change it now, but for future reference you could also use your photos as a slideshow produced in Nero and put some music to it too. If you do that, Nero offers transitions. It's a nice way to make use of all those snaps that were taken.
You're not alone with editing problems, we all have them from time to time, but forums like this bring a wealth of experience (and also trial and error) so stick at it and good luck

Thank you for your help and will take on board your idea of using nero for the photos. Nice to know there's help out there.