Loooong Rendering Times

[Don Bloom]

rendering time is dependent on a few things. The computer setup you have should be just fine to render fast BUT, it also depends on WHERE you are rendering to. Are you rendering back to the drive the program is on? What type if any effects are you running on the clips? Some (Magic Bullett among them) are very slow to render, median, levels (exposure adjustment) color correction are very heavy FXs and require a great deal of time to render. ALSO what are you rendering to? It sounds like your rendering to MPEG which means that EVERY frame of the piece has to be gone thru, looked at and the rendered (compressed) with any and all FXs applied.
So the answer is 1) never render to the same drive the program is on 2) render to AVI first. Reason? Going to AVI doesn’t take very long and then ALL of the FXs which might be applied are an included part of the new clip and then when rendering to MPEG it flows along much faster. Another step in the process? Yes but I have run some very unscientific tests on this method over the years and found that first there is no generational loss of quality (at least none that I have ever seen) and SECOND the render time of doing 1st an AVI and then MPEG is much much faster than going straight to MPEG.
Unless the clip(s) have no FXs or corrections done going from the timeline to MPEG can be a long and arduious task.
That’s my story and I’m sticking to it 😉
Don b.

[Terje A. bergesen]

Another thing to take into consideration is that some types of source media take a lot longer to render than than other types of media.

If you add DivX AVIs to your timeline, then add effects and color correction to these AVIs, be prepared to wait a long time for your renders.

[Jukebox]

Thanks! It just seems that 3 hours and 20 minutes was an awful long time to render a B&W video with no FX that ran 21 minutes.
Rendering to AVI is a nice trick to keep in the back of my head.