This is a live broadcast environment where we are continuously pulling clips directly off air and editing them for the web. We post clips to our site 24 hours a day. The idea is to get each clip up to the site as soon as possible after they air on television, which is completely dictated by render time. So this isn’t the type of work that can be batched overnight.
13 seconds vs. 26 seconds per minute of video is 1/2 the time. That’s a lot, especially when your clips get up to 40 minutes in length.
Among other reasons, we don’t use Assistant Pro because it doesn’t support network rendering, another integral part of our workflow.
I hope that explains why this is a legitimate issue for me. I am still hoping someone could explain this!