Why does rendering take so long

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Overview: Rendering is the process in which your movie (or slideshow) is generated from all material you have assembled in your project, such as video clips, stills, titles, menus, audio, etc. For example, if your final output is a DVD, Studio will have to take all the material in the timeline and convert it to an MPEG 2 format during the render process, since this is the basic format used by DVDs. So if you had AVI video files, stills, titles and menus in your project, Studio does have to "render" these files to an MPEG 2 as part of its Make Movie process.

Render times are CPU and project dependent.

CPU: The faster your computer's CPU the faster your rendering will complete. In general, for shorter rendering times, a faster CPU is better.

PROJECT: Larger, more complex projects will also have longer render times compared to shorter, simpler projects. If you use a title overlay or some filter for all or a large part of the project that also will drastically increase the render time. . If you have been rendering for quite some time, you should make sure that the rendering process is still proceeding. A quick way to do this in Studio is to check the the following:

  1. Is the Make Movie/ Export status window still displaying "Exporting frames....", "Rendering effects, transitons and titles"?
  2. Is the cancel button still active?
  3. Is the timeline scrubber still moving? (This may not be practical if you have set the timescale so that only a small section of your project is viewable on the timeline. When you render, you may want to have the entire project viewable)

If you can't tell if it is rendering from the 3 items above, you can bring up the windows performance monitor and make sure the CPU utilization is at a high level. To see the Performance Monitor do the following

  1. Hold down the Control and Alt keys and press the Delete key once.
  2. The Task Manager Window will appear
  3. Click on the Performance Tab
  4. The CPU usage should be close to 100% if Studio is still rendering.
  5. If the CPU usage is not consistantly over 90 %, then more than likely the render process has stopped for some reason.

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