Is 18 hours a "normal" rendering time for a 12 minute video? Lot's of cross fades are lengthening the process as previously mentioned in this forum. I have the Project Pref to "Best" and "None" intsead of "Uppper" or "Lower"
Any tricks to shortening rendering times without sacrificing quality?
On the face of what you say, straight transition should NOT give these figures. If you are rendering directly to an MPEG or something "other" than plain vanilla avi then you are into lo n g re n e d e r s . . yes?
My method is, if I've got a lot of "stuff" happenning, lots of fxs and so on, firstly Pre-render the section; render to a new track or Render as to an AVI then use this rendered file as the file for "other" formats - yes? Doing renders with "cross" formats is asking for a lot of maths being done AND at the same time as the NEW file is being brought together . . . best explanation and solution I can come up with.
S0:
1 - Pre-render
2- Create a plain vanilla DV-AVI
3 - Create the final Format you want from 2 above.
Of course this will "bump" up your storage requirements . .so it's a trade off, ie RENDER-TIME <> STORAGE [ ie cost of bigger/multiple drives! ]