[Mollie Reeder]

Guys, these were all excellent answers. I am filing all of these suggestions away for future reference. This has been a stressful, but educational experience. ?

At this point, it looks like it’s a problem with our Drobo. This weekend, I manually copied a small reel off the Drobo onto a different drive, did a render and a transcode and it was lightning fast and behaved like it should. I’m moving footage to a different system and hopefully that will get us back on track! I think the Drobo was just too full (one of the drives was yellow) and even though I was trying to export/write to a different destination, its read speeds were tanking and causing the process to fatally lag.

Hopefully new drives will get us moving forward again! Thanks again.