rendering too long!!!
 

After editing, I had to make a small change that turned the timeline render bar to orange (unlimited). Do I have to render before exporting to compressor or quicktime? It gave me a 17 hour export time. macbook pro 2.16 4 gigs. HdV timeline to sd best quality 90 minutes. Or is there a better way?

Is your sequence render codec set to "same as sequence" or Apple ProRes? I'd recommend the latter (Sequence menu > Sequence Settings >> Render Control tab)

You could also try changing your Sequence Preset itself to Apple ProRes 422 (1440x1080) and then exporting as a Quicktime Movie (Sequence menu > Sequence Settings >> Load Sequence Preset button)

Depending on the length of the sequence that may not be an unrealistic time.

Software encoding creates the greatest load on computing power than anything else and HDV and other long-GOP codecs like AVCHD being encoded to DVD or other transport streams take the longest.

You may find that the 17-hour estimate gets knocked down a bit during the encode but in general you can expect 4-6x over real-time per second for encoding HD down to DVD.