Does The New CS4 Media Encoder Seem Slow?

Question

I selected some B-Roll that was shot in P2 1080i and brought it into a standard definition project. I scaled it to about 44% and sped up one timelapse segment by about 900%. The resulting length was about 8 minutes.
Transcoding this 8 minute sequence into 720x480 NTSC With the CS4 Media Encoder is taking over 3 hours! This is on a system with an Intel Q6600 processor.
Has anyone else noticed that the new Media Encoder seems slower? I don't think it uses existing render files like previous versions of Premiere.

Answer 1

"DV project. If you have three clips AND THE 2ND ONE is color corrected then you do a 'preview render' that 2nd clip is rendered to dv so it will play real time in your timeline. Then when you render out to DVD clip 2 is rendered yet again to Mpeg-2. It has been rendered twice, it a second generation image unlike CLIP 1 AND 3 WHICH are still first generation before the Mpeg encoding"
Sorry typing faster than my brain. Sorry trying to get work done and help people got the better of my fingers brain. The above is corrected with the corrected in CAPS.
In a nutshell when you use preview files your telling the computer to use files that have already lost a generation to make your edit faster.
If you edit DV the preview renders the effect (or whatever) to whatever is set in the sequence files. So a new DV file is made, which is rendered into an MPEG (or quicktime, Blu-ray whatever).
"But if you are saying that re-render renders the already rendered preview clip, I believe that you may be in error. I thought re-render ignored the previews and looked to the source file(s) again. Am I wrong?"
Yes your wrong because your assuming the preview render was done in the format your outputing in AME. If re-render 'ignored the previews and looked for the source file(s) again' there wouldn't be any render to 're-render'.
The Preview render renders a new file based on your media codec (dv to dv, HDV to i-frame. dvcpro to dvcpro). It has no way of knowing what your final setting in AME are going to be. So preview files are double rendered.