Hello,

I have a minimal knowledge of the tricks and inner workings of Premiere CS3. I will easily admit that. I'm an Avid guy typically. However, when I know I'll be doing something a little sophisticated with graphics and stuff, I love to use AE/Premiere/Encore when I can.

My problem came when I decided to shoot a hour long talent show the other day. I plan on doing a lot of HD stuff in the near future and I knew I would be able to rely on my SD footage for this play (they only wanted one camera). So, I recorded in SD with one camera(xl-2), and HDV with the other (z1u).

I made a SD widescreen project in Premiere. I captured both cameras footage in their natural format. Then, I scaled down the HD footage to fit my project width. Everything so far so good.

Then, when I went to export to encore(with no menu) it wanted me to render into a MPEG2-DVD format. I changed some settings to ensure I got a good quality that'd fit on a disc (8mbps, 5 quality) and hit Okay.

Estimated time was 48 hours.


What did I do wrong?
Or is this correct? How can I cut that time down to something not ridiculous?

I'd like to continue building up my HD footage to show future clients.

System specs:
Win XP w/ SP3
AMD Dual Core 2.2
4GB Ram
500GB SATA drive

I would suggest letting it run a little while first and then check the estimated time left. Premiere looks at how long it is taking to render the current frames and then assumes the rest of the project will take that same amount of time per frame for the rest of the project. If you have complex stuff at the beginning (titles, several layers, graphics, etc) it will think the rest of the project is the same way. Once it gets past the heavy stuff if will go much quicker and begin to give you a more accurate estimate.

Some effect do take a long time to render. I know when I use Magic Bullet to color correct it takes a real long time to render, but even my most compex stuff usually isn't more than a 10 to 1 ratio (10 hours to render 1 hour).

My guess is that the processing time is in the rescaling of your HDV footage.

Since it's the Z1U, why not use its real time SD conversion on ingest?

Lloyd's correct. Premier Pro extrapolates the time remaining based upon what it's doing at that moment. Compositing always takes significantly longer. Down resing probably taking up a bunch of time.

Your computer is roughly the same config my second machine (3.0gHz). If you render for a while and your ETA doesn't drop significantly I'd suspect that something is amiss. I just rendered a 90 minute project on that machine. It was 1080 24p and I used TMPGEnc and it only took about 10 hours. Yes, there are too many differences to draw a correlation but 48 hours seems extraordinarily long.