Step 3: Rendering
At this point, you have the video edited. Everything is on the right layers in the right order with the right transitions. When you hit play in the viewer window, the video looks exactly the way you want it. The next step is to get it from your computer to DVD.
What is rendering?
Right now all those snippets are in some editable format (MPG-1, MOV, DV) in little pieces. What rendering does is take all those snippets, audio and transitions and makes one whole movie file out of them in DVD format (MPG-2).
How is it done?
Usually in the menu, the render and burn to DVD is one button you need to click. Some people like to render the whole DVD movie file without burning it. That way they can import that movie file to a DVD burning program so they can add a DVD menu.
How long does it take?
How long rendering takes depends on:
- How powerful your computer is.
- How many tracks you end up using.
- How many transitions you use.
- How long the video is.
On our 3GHz Pentium 4 computer, rendering takes around 4 times the length of the video. A 15 minute video will take 1 hour. We've done 1 hour wedding videos that take 8 hours to render, but that's because of the large amount of effects to correct bad lighting and camera shake, and the specialty editing involed.
4 times the playable length is considered fast for consumer and prosumer software-based rendering. The next generation dual-layer Pentium chip just got released which will cut down rendering time a little more. As faster and better chips come out, the rendering time will get shorter and shorter.
Real-time rendering is when a 15 minute video takes 15 minutes to render. This requires a pro-level hardware-based rendering which means buying a rendering card that starts at $999 for the Matrox brands. They go as high as $3000 for the high end rendering card. You don't need real-time rendering for home movies. Set your computer to render before you go to bed and it will be ready for you in the morning.
Hard Drive Requirements
Rendering requires some room on your hard drive. Rendering will create a movie file that will fit onto a DVD. Four gigabytes is the amount of space on a DVD. If for some reason, that file rendered is too big to fit on a DVD or there's not enough room on your hard drive, your sofware should give you a warning that there's not enough room.
A fifteen minute video file in MPG-2 (playable DVD format) should take less than one gigabyte. If it's bigger than one gigabyte then you have the rendering quality setting too high.