“My machine has the max amount of ram 4 gigs with a internal 250 GB drive. I have several external Lacie drives hanging off of it for storage and backup. One 1TB on the FW800 port One 1TB on the FW400 Port and a 500GB off of the usb port. I have my source video files on the FW800 drive and the FCE project on the FW400 drive with all apps and os on the internal drive.”
I like the way you are organizing your media and project files, but unfortunately all of that has very little to do with rendering time. Processor speed is where it’s at, however, a video of that length should not take that long to compress for Vimeo.
I think the issue is that you shot AVCHD video. AVCHD is compressed in a way where video frames share data with one another. If you want to compress video in this format to another, more compressed format, your processor is having to look at many frames at a time to determine how best to compress the video. Does that make sense?
If all you are doing is exporting for web, then I suggest editing in DV/NTSC. Yes, it’s standard def, but you’re only delivering to the internet, and because DV is an I-frame codec, the processor is compressing one frame at a time, rather than looking at multiple frames at a time.
