What is the fastest format to render too? assuming all the same effects and timeline, HD footage 1440x1080 what is the fastest format to render too? Full size WMV, HD uncompressed, HD compressed, quicktime?

What about shrinking? say down to a HD 720 which is still decent enough for me to show on a computer screen? is that slower than fullsize render or faster? It seems to me that to take the HD footage and make a WMV full size takes a lot longer than making a 320 size WMV which seemed strange since it has to compress and aslo resize everything which promted me to ask.

Thanks.

.m2t 720p30 or 1080p30 seemed to be the fastest for me... maybe 2-3x realtime depending on the effects...

Uncompressed is usually your best bet... as the codec has nothing to compress.. less work... faster :)

Another part though is how much "editing" there is... if it's straight cuts, there shouldn't be anymore work for the Codec... but if it has to render 57,000 pixels (320 x 180) vs. 2,073,600 pixels (1920 x 1080)... that's about 40x as many pixels.

The more compression, the more editing, the more pixels = the more work for the codec... the longer it takes...

In my experience using Edius, rendering back to the HDV format is significantly faster than more compressed options like WMV-HD and H.264. For web delivery I use WMV at either 960x540 or 720p resolution, as encoding full 1080p takes too long. Long encoding times for higher resolutions makes sense because there are more total data points to be created, which requires more processing (and hence more time) than lower resolutions.