When I try to burn a DVD-r, pinnacle starts rendering the movie
but when he starts burning he burns the disc for about 10-30secs and then gives a message, finish burning.

There is nothing on the disc and I cannot be formatted any more. Is this a bug in Pinnacle 9?

I'm using Windows XP Pro, Nec DVD RW writer and Prime Disc DVDs.

had a similar problem to this.
So I tried burning at 1x. Worked only some times then.
Cured it by flashing burner (Panasonic LF-D310) firmware back one version (from version A128 to A127).
Burns fine everytime now. Aparently in the first 10 - 20 secs of a burn the drives burn speed is 'callibrated'. Failure at this operation was occuring.