Is there any way to shorten the render time for a PIP that lasts several hours? The render time is five times as long and I have ten more hours of PIP left to produce.

What resolution and codecs are you using?

I'm using AVC-HD with ProRes 1920 x 1080 compressed to MPEG-2.

Since I'm converting to SD anyway, is there any way I can convert before it has to compress this. A two hour project has been rendering for 16 hours so far and I have several deadlines. Do I just change the sequence settings?

Create an SD sequence, and scale your footage down in the sequence, not on export. This way FCP will only have to render 1/4th of the size, performing all PiP calculations in SD resolution. This should speed up your work considerably. AVCHD and MPEG are both computationally intensive codecs, and by your render time I assume your machine is not very fast.

Thank you Bart! What would you recommend for a 16:9 SD sequence?

Standard DV codec should do fine. Uncompressed or DVCPRO50 would be other options if you really wanted to go for quality, but might be an overkill. And if you only want to deliver it as a DVD, then by all means go straight to MPEG-2, you'll have to convert your material to it anyway.

Thank you so much Bart!

Or run media manager overnight & have everything in SD ready for you in the morning.

It'll take less time to render SD in a SD sequence, than HD in a SD sequence.

Also make sure rendering setting is on 8-bit, not 10-bit. I've found this can double my render times at least.