As I see it, your general plan is to use your camcorder to record HD video to a flash memory card. Move the card to your computer and whether you copy the files to your hard drive or use them as they are on the SD card, the system will work the same. Now you open Adobe Premiere Express (or whatever) and import video from the SD card. This is done at faster than real time, then you can add a touch of flash to the program and you're ready to make a DVD. Using your version of Premiere, under the render options you select "save video on DVD" and hit GO. Then fourteen months later, out pops a Standard Definition DVD of your 720p recording in 16:9 MPG2 format that when inserted into a DVD player will start, play once and stop. I'll have a couple of questions about your workflow later, but first we should look at where your bottlenecks may lie.
The biggest processor hog I see is video compression. The native files copied from the flash memory card are HD 720p files. Your version of Premiere deals with that format natively. And then it's time to shrink the video to play on an ordinary DVD player. If there are any options available, you'd want to select "Highest" quality rendering. The highest quality rendering of any video format into MPEG2 files uses a two-pass processing system that roughly triples the processing time over a one-pass render setting. But in my estimation, the results are more than worth it.
What I see as your largest consumer of time is the compression of HD 720p into MPG2 SD video for DVD's. Sometimes a tweak on the NLE can cause it to default differently. Like adjusting the project properties in Premiere to 16:9 SD video. So when Premiere pre-renders the entire project before compression, it isn't making an HD 720p version for compression (especially a two-pass compression.) If project properties are set for SD video, the pre-render (to generate actual SD video with EFX & graphics and audio mixes) may take a little longer, but the MPG2 compression will practically fly, even in a two-pass compression.
If that doesn't help, there may be an easy work-around. The enormous time consumed to compress the video in the computer might be eliminated by using a "real time" video capture. My understanding is that a lot of flash media camcorders are able to play back SD video via their Firewire (IEEE 1394) port. Import the video in a 16:9 SD video with only Intra-frame compression, AVI is my first thought, then you use that to edit and print to DVD. If the camcorder doesn't provide the SD playback function, you can do your own video format conversion before you do your editing. Use your Adobe NLE splice all the source video any which way is easiest, then render it to your hard drive as something like an AVI file. Turn around and start a new project using that file and you'll almost certainly experience a drastic reduction in the time it takes for the edited program to end up burned to a DVD.
Hope this helps! But I did want to make sure you're using the most appropriate format for recording your video.
Since you record to flash media, you are almost certainly re-using your SD cards. So you must have some method of archiving those source files in their native format. Some folks buy external hard drives and store video data until it is full, then replace the drive with another and store the full drive as a permanent back-up. Others, like myself, use DVD's as data disc's and store 20 minutes of AVI per DVD to saving the highest quality video we have, then store the DVD's for permanent back-up. But my point is that if you're not saving your original video files, you could save a lot of time by recording in an SD format at the outset.
I don't want to sound insulting or insinuate everyone should be archiving their raw video. I worked for many years directly with video beginners and I was surprised at how few actually saved their original tapes once they'd finished their editing. They saved the edited programs and made copies till they'd nearly wear out. But anyway, if you're not saving your HD source files so your grandchildren can use the video in HD to tease their parents, or your children, or some such possibility. If you're not saving the raw video for future possibilities, you're much better off starting out nearer the format you're going to actually save it in.
But if you are, like myself, archiving your video for no apparent reason, then take heart in this, "If somehow our civilization was destroyed, then centuries later, when our mutated descendants began to explore ages past by digging through the layer of plastic debris marking our highest point in history, they may just find your ancient archive of family videos (we hope) and YOUR family will be presented as representatives of life before planerary collapse!"Â Â Cool, eh?
So anyway, try fooling with your project properties first, but use just a two minute clip written to a DVD-RW, if written at all. But you've described a text book version of the symptoms of extreme compression, even though your end-product doesn't look compressed at all. Take heart I believe you'll soon lick this problem.
Now have fun and Good Luck!
