Your system sounds close to my new system. And generally speaking, I would say no – that’s not normal. Right now I’m editing an elementary school “play” where the run time comes close to 2 hours. Plus, I am editing a music video of the kid’s after party for the dvd extras, and, I’m putting together a slide show set to music from stills that people gave me throughout the production lifecycle.. All of this footage is in the same project. Oh, and several After Effects animations I did as well.. Longest it’s taken to open my project was still less than 45 seconds..
Now the next question: Why does yours take so long and how do you fix it? Good questions.. There’s so many factors involved but I’m wondering if you don’t have some kind of bad clip reference or soemthing in there..
What OS? XP / Vista
Where do you keep your project files (including scratch disk locations, etc)? (I have a serial RAID 0 setup and since that’s faster than my ‘C’ drive I put all of my project files as well as video within that RAID array somewhere..
Your footage – is it all uncompressed or various codec / file types? (Strongly reccomend uncompressed avi’s for all editing..)
Hopefully someone else may have more of an idea off the top of their heads without knowing the above.. (and after I get the answers to the above, there’s no guarentee that I’ll know what to do either!)
–KTFA