slow render times
 

I have a dual 1.25 with 1gig of ram. Normally it wizzes through renders at a nice pace, but lately has been noticibly sluggish. Renders are now taking 2-3 times as long as they used to.
I've repaired everything with disk utility and defragmented the drive, but its still not as fast as before. Any suggestions?

How full is the drive and have you trashed the three preferences files?

I forgot about trashing the prefs. I'll do that then see how everything goes. As far as the drives, that's definately not an issue. My boot drive has 142GB and my video drive has 165GB free.

The strange thing, going back to the render times, is that sometimes if it shows a really long render, sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes I'll even cancel the first render that says 20 minutes, then start it right back up again and it will only need 7 minutes. Could this be processor related even though I'm not running any other programs?

The render times are wild guesses. The timers are usually based on the first thing you render and *assume* all the footage down stream will take the same amount of time to render. That is rarely the case.

Some timers also include the initial delay so it might show something absurd like 1 hour then quickly drop down to a fairly reasonable guestimate.

2- Are you using nesting or stacked filters by any chance? Certain combinations of filters tend to be slow.

What are nesting and stacked filters? They sound more complicated that what I generally use - color correction, deinterlace.

By stacking filters I mean multiple filters on a clip.

Nesting is when you put one sequence inside another.

2- You might want to check that the opacity of all your clips are 100%. You can check the little black line that runs across the top of your clips.

I actually have nested a sequence within another. I always figured that if the original was already fully rendered out, it would not effect the render times of the new sequence. I've also stacked filters, but always expected higher render times from that. It sounds like you're on the right track, Glenn. I can deal with this for now, but will hopefully have FCP-HD soon. Then, with the real-time effects, I won't have to worry about most of this.

Thank you both for the help.