using my Pentium 1.7 system with 256 RAM I ttried to render a 53 minute movie after applying effects in After Effects, using Cinelook plugin. I was given a rendering time of an estimated 53 hours!!! is this normal on such a relatively new PC? Surely 53 hours is rediculous and I am doing something wrong. Capturing was perfectly OK with no dropped frames at all so the system must be running fine in general.

Any hints to speed up rendering process?

1 hour per minute of footage render time is a bit much, but depending on all the options you have turned on in After Effects, it could be about right. In most cases you just have to bite the bullet and hope that the number of hours it gives you is a pessimistic estimate. But there are a few things you can try to reduce the computational complexity of a render.

Basically, it all comes down to thinking the way an image processing program thinks: how many iterations of rendering do I have to perform on each and every pixel in each and every row and column of each and every frame? And then, trying to cut back as much as is tolerable on those iterations. For example, perhaps you have motion blur turned on; this is a cycle hog and can safely be turned off if all you're adding is a filmlook filter or color correction.

Your RAM does seem a little low for a rendering workstation. With RAM so cheap these days, there's little reason not to have at least 1 GB of RAM in your computer. RAM is often the limiting factor on renders.

Large render times for small corrections on long clips is one reason why real-time cards like the DV Storm are so appreciated...