Aspect ratio affects render time?

Hey,
We are a post production studio, working with 2011 Mac Pro machines (With 16-32 GB Ram, New Nvidia card utilising CUDA and an SSD drive for media cache) on the latest version of Premiere CC.
Lately we've notice certain projects take longer to render out of Premiere - We are mainly producing promos so our final movies are usually 30 seconds long. After checking what the "slow" projects had in common, I noticed that they all seem to be SD resolution. While exporting 1080p takes about two minutes, exporting SD (PAL 720x576) seems to take up to 5 times longer - between 5-10 minutes (again, for a 30 seconds video!).
We are working with ProRes 422 LT codec and are exporting via premiere (without queueing through ME), using the "Same as sequence" checkbox, with Maximum render quality checked. The footage is originally ProRes LT and the sequence settings match the files perfectly; The output file we are trying to get is also a ProRes LT mov file.
I've tested this on five different machines, tried locally and from our network, with different settings and presets, but the result always seems the same - exporting PAL takes a lot longer then exporting full HD footage.
This seems extremely strange to me, and I couldn't find any logical reason for this, so I'm hoping someone here will have the answer - why is this the case? Is Premiere just not built to handle SD footage well? Are there specific settings that might make our export quicker?
We have to export 5 versions for each promo, so this is a big problem for us - a process that usually takes 10 minutes in 1080p, is now taking an hour!
Any info would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks,
Michael

Hey,
Thanks again for your help, for some reason your export seems to be a lot faster than ours, even though we are using Mac Pro towers with stronger specs then an 2011 iMac.
The only thing you seem to be doing differently is having AVCHD in MOV wrapper as your original footage, our's is natively ProRes 422, and the export from ProRes (4x3 PAL) to ProRes seems to be extremely slow on Premiere. This should just be your run-in-the-mail "same as sequence" export, so I really don't see a reason for it to take so long.. I don't want to be "that guy" that comes into the Adobe forums with complains, but with FCP7 we obviously never had these issues.
We are indeed exporting to broadcast - we are making TV Promos for a couple of major channels and a big satellite company here in Israel. our kids channels unfortunately still air in 4x3, and since we are exporting 5 versions for each promo, and about 3 promos a day for that specific client - well.. that would be a lot of coffee!
I am also aware that PAL requires 25fps, that is the standard for broadcast here and the original footage is shot and delivered to us that way, so that shouldn't affect the export either.
The thing I'm still finding extremely weird about this whole thing is that this problem doesn't seem to exist with widescreen (16x9) PAL footage, but only with 4x3. I would understand it taking longer if this was a WS sequence which premiere had to re-conform during the export, but that is just not the case.. I'm basically taking a video that already has the exact specs I'm using for export (that was rendered out of AE), PAL 4x3 ProRes 422 LT, 30 seconds video, adding an audio track to it and exporting out with the same settings as both the sequence and original footage. There is no reason that should take 5-10 minutes on machines that do the same for 1080p in one minute.
Thanks again, and as always any further info would be greatly appreciated,
Michael

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