Hello everyone!
I am rendering a 120-minute SD timeline in Premiere Pro CS3 and it says "estimated Time Left - 66 hours". :) Is this for real?? The timeline contains several AVCHD rescaled to SD clips that have Magic Bullet - "Looks" applied as well as Premiere's "Dust and Scratches" at level 7 (to make it look like cartoon). Other clips are SD with the above effects plus saturation at level 9. Some clips were sped up, some slowed down.

My question; How can I optimize Premiere Pro CS3 to render faster on my machine?
Win XP X64, 2.4GHZ Q6600 Quad CPU, 8GB RAM, C: drive 150GB WD Raptor, Two 500GB Seagate Barracuda's in RAID0 (the footage and premiere project file is on this drive)

Any comments are truly appreciated!

Thanks

Let it render for a while. Clips that have this amount of processing (AVCHD+downscaling+Dust and Scratches+Looks+Time manipulation on the same clip is a REAL CPU killer, whatever your CPU is - people here have problems just PLAYING AVCHD) will bump up rendering estimate to sky levels, but chances are your 120 minutes do not all consist of such super taxing clips and estimated time will go down. If they do, you are in for a long wait...

During the spring/summer, I did a 2 hour project a week. Each had a specialized title card at the beginning that was an embedded AE comp composited over background video. The first few seconds rendered out like a scalded dog, but when it got to the title the time estimate would stretch out to over 12 hours. Once the title was done, it was off to the races.

As Jiri said, you should let it go for a few hours and then compare the percentage complete to the time spent processing to that point. That will give you a better estimate of how long the whole project will take to render out.

I get the sense that your video card can influence render speed, with more powerful ones being faster, but I'm pretty much in the dark on the topic and could be completely wrong.

Specialized hardware aside, adding effects to your timeline will cost CPU cycles. The more effects, the longer it will take. And there's no uniformity to the cycle cost across different effects. Color correction can be pretty quick. Compositing often takes longer.