Here's a question I have... why are you rendering at all?

If this is just for them to view with dinner, why not just hook up your laptop and play the video out straight from the timeline? You can render it later if necessary. That way, you'll be ready to go as soon as you copy the footage over from the cards.

Thanks Perrone! (math was never my strong suit)

I'm really not "rendering". I need to be able to drop new footage in my SD timeline. I've got a bunch of graphics and music that I use to "spice up" the project. So I need SD footage to match up with it. Unfortunately this means that I have to transcode my HD footage to SD so it will match up with the SD graphics.

I think I'm going to go with using the Export function because of the faster speed.

The weird thing is that last year I shot 45 minutes of footage, but in my notes it says it only took me 45 minutes to log and capture it. (I didn't just capture the footage all in one clip, I actually marked in/out and batch captured it) I'm guessing my notes are wrong and it actually took much longer than 45 minutes......at least that's what I'm hoping. :)

Sorry, I am not familiar with your editor. In Vegas, we woudln't need to to do anything here. Just drop the HD file into an SD project with the SD graphics and hit play. Everything would play out in preview just fine.

I can do that as well, but the footage looks terrible.......no rendering needed.

I wonder if it's because I'm dropping square-pixel footage into a non-square pixel (DV) timeline. Hmmmm........I've got time for more testing today.

Just wanted to update everyone....

I ended up using Clip Browser to Export as AVI DV. It worked great. Relitivily fast to transcode and the quality was decent. I actually got the project finished 15 minutes before the deadline.

Thanks for all the advice.