I shoot a monthly job on the EX1 where there is 4 hrs of footage in 20 clips. The same every month. Then I render out full size QT out of FC for each of the 20 clips. The client views the footage in QT pro on a PC. Currently I then render out of QT. Now this is the time consumer. I also burn a BluRay with all clips.

QT settings I use H.264
29.97 frame
Key frame 29.97
Frame record
Bit rate automatic (this seems better quality then setting a rate)
1920x1080
No audio

With a few test I have found that QT renders faster then Compressor.

My total rendering monthly for this job is 45 hrs having to restart at for each clip to be its own file.

Machine is Mac Pro
Two Quad core 3.0
16GB ram
Dulce 4TB RAID with card

Thoughts on how to cut time?

It's unclear why you would need such a high-level method for sending your client what amounts to "dailies".

If you're stuck using this workflow due to client demands there's only 2 cost-effective things you can do to speed up your renders/encoding jobs:

1. Get a faster machine (the newer Mac's all use a much larger bandwidth front-side and RAM-bus cutting encoding times almost in half on certain codecs).

2. Get Episode Desktop, which is 50% faster (or more depending on codec) than QT or Compressor at making any encode on any Mac.

I'm also looking to shorten H.264 encode times. Still researching these solutions, but they look pretty promising:

Elgato Turbo.264 HD - H.264 Encoder (http://www.elgato.com/elgato/int/mainmenu/products/Accessories/Turbo264HD/product1.en.html) Matrox MXO2 with MAX technology (http://www.matrox.com/video/en/products/mxo2/) Matrox MXO2 Mini with MAX technology (http://www.matrox.com/video/en/products/mxo2_mini/)
* the three products above work with Macbook Pros which is what I mainly edit on, but if you use a Mac Pro you could also use the Matrox CompressHD (http://www.matrox.com/video/en/products/compresshd/).

Michael thanks for the lead on the Matrox CompressHD. I will see if anyone has been using this card since it looks like a winner for me where most of my clients want H.264 in QT files or BluRay.

Robert the Episode Desktop seems expensive.

Robert I should have asked this in the response to your post. What method would you use to deliver HD footage that the client can see on PC? It must be in 1080p HD with as much detail as possible.