Jason Dunn
05-27-2004, 04:36 PM
Back in June of 2002, I was working on <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0735618739/jasondunn-20">Faster Smarter Digital Video</a>, and I of course wanted to cover DVD burning. DVD burners has just reached reasonable prices for consumers (sub $500), and I knew it was an important topic to cover. I contacted Pioneer, who had the much-praised A04 2x DVD-R burner on the market, and requested a loaner for the book. They were all out, and I had a looming deadline (I wrote 10 chapters in 10 weeks for that book). So, having no other choice, I dropped $585 CND on the drive at a local store, and got to work writing the book.<br /><br />Burning a full DVD at 2x was a fairly painful process, especially when you factored in the closing process on the disc. Because of that, I used my DVD burner when I wasn't there. Confused? I'd start a DVD creation process (video encoding + burning), and let it run over night. On the rare occasion when I needed to burn a DVD from footage I already had prepared, it was agonizing to watch a DVD burn at 1x - which is the speed it always seemed to default to in Pinnacle Studio 8. :roll: <br /><br />I'd put off buying a faster DVD burner for quite some time, simply because I didn't have the need to burn many DVDs. But after the prices have dropped so much lately, I couldn't resist - I picked up a cheap LiteOn 8x DVD +/- combo burner, and <a href="http://www.ritek.com.tw/">Ritek</a> sent me some 8x DVDs. I was pondering waiting for the 12x drives to hit the market, but last I heard the 12x media wasn't going to be ready until the latter part of the year, so 8x seemed like a good compromise.<br /><br />Talk about a world of difference over my 1x burning experiences! I took 3.39 GB of scanned photos, stored in fat BMP format, and burned them at 8x - the process only took 7 minutes and 15 seconds using <a href="http://www.nero.com/us/index.html">NERO Ultra 6</a>. :D It was up to 18 minutes and 48 seconds once it finished the verification process, but these were images I didn't want to lose and I needed a perfect burn.<br /><br />Long live fast DVD burners! :D