Is there a way to encode multiple videos for different dvd's at once?

I want to clear up some hard drive space and burn some videos onto DVD. However, it takes about an hour per video, I can only burn one at a time, and 95% of the time it spends burning, it is just converting it to the correct format. Is there a way I can encode multiple videos at once, perhaps overnight, so that burning each movie onto DVD will take no more than 5 minutes because it doesn't need to convert anything? I'm currently using Windows DVD Maker.