Just built a new machine for editing and would like to ask someone with some experience in the programs that I'm using if the render time is normal.

I'm using an Sony HRD-HC9 camera. I'm editing using Adobe Premiere Pro 3, with the plugin Magic Bullet Looks.

I've got an Intel 2.8gig quad core processor, with 4gig RAM, and a Radeon HD 4850 video card. The HDs are SATA 7200s.

I'm working with mpeg at 1440x1080 that expands to 1920x1080. This may be my fault, but to get to an anamorphic aspect ratio look, I created a photoshop document at 1920x1080, and made black bars. I placed that over all the video, which of course, needed rendering. This doesn't take too long. (And yes, I realize exporting h.264 MP4 I can just select the area I want, rather than having the bars, but the contest I was working with required an SD export for DVD purposes).

Anyway, I color graded it in Magic Bullet Looks. When I clicked render, it was about 3AM. When it finished, it was close to 8AM. The video is 7 minutes long.

I did a 2 pass export for DVD Mgpeg at standard def, and that took about 4 hours to export. Then I did an h.264 MP4 export at around 5MB/sec and it took about 5 hours to export.

Am I doing something wrong? Is there something I've possibly overlooked when setting up my computer? Or is this about standard for what I'm trying to do.

Here's a link to the video I exported, so you can see what I'm talking about. This one is the MP4, 5mb/sec h.264 VIDEO (http://vimeo.com/2015087)

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Magic Bullet is very time consuming. Try again without Magic Bullet and you'll see what I mean.

Yeah, standard exporting is much faster. I was just making sure that these render times were right, and that I hadn't done something wrong.

I read somewhere that MBL is optimized for the Nvidia cards but not others. If you plan on doing a lot with MBL, you might want to look into a new card to save your rendering time.

To know if something is slow, you need to establish performance baselines for your PC setup.

eg.
Create a 10 minutes video sequence linking some shots together and "time" the renders
1. render unchanged
2. render @ different sound sample rates
3. render source and destination on a single disk
4. render source and destination across different disk sets
5. Add Magic bullet elements and render out
6. render out to flash
7. render out to DVD
etc ...

In doing this with a "short" sequence that provides the same source for all variations, you get an understanding of which options will improve or degrade your render times.

Baselining will allow you to anticipating how render options in more complex projects will be delt with by your hardware.

OT:
How have you arranged your HDD's

* If you read/write to the same disk, you are slowed by disk head contention
* Same RAID setups are fast for write, others slow for write but blistering for read ....
* SATA drives offer some improvment over IDE
* SCSI 10/15K disks beat SATA
* Clean scratchpad HDD's will be faster than cluttered drives for writes ...

Any process that is I/O heavy (like video or databases) can be performance improved by strategic disk management