Now, I wouldn't expect Encore to be able to transcode everything quickly at all since I'm on a laptop and I have over 200 clips, all with transitions and color corrections, and the clips I've used are pulled from several cameras going back years to old SD film cameras and are all different sizes and PARs (1920x1080 (1.0), 1440x1080(1.33), 853x480(1.0), 720x480 (0.9091), but would all those different file types cause Encore to start and stop repeatedly? I've never has this happen with any other project, but I've never worked on a project this messed up either haha.
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Any ideas on what's happening and/ or what I can to do fix it? Am I going to have to go through all the clips and convert them to the same size and PAR?
I think you know where this one is going based on the selective quote above.........and mixing up aspect ratios & PAR is a recipe for a seriously slow transcode & probable disaster at the end of it all - if you forgot to interpret one piece of footage cirrectly, it will all fall apart.
Encore is an authoring tool, not a video editor & standards converter and prefers to be fed directly with the properly compliant assets needed for your project. For DVD, this is all one size but for BD itgets a little more (okay, a LOT more) complicated.
Are you making BD or DVD? What region are you in (PAL or NTSC) and what frame rates are all these clips at?