I have an hour of SD footage in an SD sequence along with titles and other graphics. Rendering to MPEG2 takes hours and rendering to a DV AVI files takes about an hour and a half. Computer is a Phenom 2 Quad core with 4GB ram. Not sure whats wrong here but the same activity would take less than 1/2 hour to render to DV in Avid Liquid. Any ideas?

I think you accidental choose the wrong forum: your in the Adobe section.
Maybe a moderator can move this post.

Have you applied a lot of color correction or other effects?

Do you have other applications running in the background?

Does your hard drive have ample space?

We need more details from you before anyone can provide a more helpful explanation. What version of Adobe CS are you running?

Thanks for the replies. No I didn't post in the wrong forum, I am using Premiere Pro CS5. I only mentioned that the same type of production took a lot less time in a different NLE. I have no color correction, no background Apps and I render to a different drive than the one with the footage. I do have several sequences from which I create a master sequence, would that have any effect on the render times?

Do all of your sequences have the same kind of video, or are they from the same source?

I remember one instance where I had some clips of 24p video that I needed to cut into a 30p timeline. When it came time to render, my system really bogged down and took its time converting the 24p material.

Do you have your sequences set up properly?

Another hard learning experience I've had was just clicking the wrong button when starting a new project. I was bringing in HDV shot in 30p, so I chose HDV 1080p/30 when starting a new sequence. After horrendously slow performance and multiple crashes, I realized I should have chosen the HDV 1080i/30 setting instead. After that, everything ran like a dream.

I'd be willing to bet that one or more of your sequences has a video format that doesn't match with your master sequence parameters. I've run into this kind of problem somewhat frequently.

Are you working with PAL video?

Another instance where a client needed a render in PAL to send over to their client in Europe. The original NTSC render took a predictable amount of time to render, but rendering the same thing in PAL took 4 times longer.

Hope this helps!

.. an hour of SD footage ...with titles and other graphics. Rendering to MPEG2 takes hours and rendering to a DV AVI files takes about an hour and a half. Computer is ... with 4GB ram. ... the same activity would take less than 1/2 hour to render to DV in Avid Liquid.

Maybe you have this covered already, but some thoughts:

If you have titles, motion graphics and are transcoding to MPEG-2, it will take time. The CS5 recommended specs suggest at least 12GB RAM. In your case, the limited amount of RAM might not be helping the CPU reach max potential. While rendering, are all cores maxing out? If not, there's a bottleneck (RAM, Hard drive, motherboard, GPU). Hope this helps.

Computer is a Phenom 2 Quad core with 4GB ram. Not sure whats wrong here but the same activity would take less than 1/2 hour to render to DV in Avid Liquid. Any ideas?

What you are also seeing here is the heavy use CS5 makes of SSE 4.1+, which may not be the case in another NLE. The fact that the AMD lacks that support is the reason rendering is very slow and why AMD always gets blown away by any Intel. Add to that the very limited memory, which causes a lot of swapping and latencies between the CPU and memory and the result is about as I would expect it.

Thanks all. I believe Harm's answer is more in line with what I am experiencing. Will add another 4GB of ram and see. Any other upgrade will have to wait. I will see if I can optimize my wokflow to accommodate.

David,

Before you run out to get extra memory, check out the AMD results here, even with 8 or more GB of memory. PPBM5 Benchmark (http://ppbm5.com/index.html)

It would be a waste of money if you may decide in the near future to upgrade to an Intel based system.
From what I see on the results page, adding extra memory may help a bit, but it does not alleviate the structural problem of the lacking SSE 4.1+ support.

I appreciate what you have said, however I wasn't planning to just go and buy memory. I have another 4GB available in another system to try and if the benefit is negligible then I wont buy.

Yes, I concur with Harm. The AMD processors lack full support of SSE 4.x, which is why even a quad-core Phenom II performs no better in Adobe than an Intel Core 2 Quad Q8xxx series processor. And even an (overclocked) X6 barely keeps pace with a stock-speed low-end i7.

As great of a value those AMD processors are for most other applications, they are not so hot when it comes to Adobe Creative Suite apps.