Exporting to broadband extremely slow render

Question

When I'm exporting a sequence to broadband quality it takes over 5 hours to export about an hour of video. How come its taking this long when I can export at full quality in only 12 minutes?

Answer 1

Think about it like this. You have a file that's 100MB, and you want to make another file in another codec that's 100MB. No problem. Simple transcode does it. Now you want to make a file that's 50MB. Takes twice as much work. Twice as much thinking and compression has to go on to reduce the file size. A lot of calculations have to be made to figure out how to throw out the data to make the file smaller. It can't simply trim off the last third of the movie. OK, now you want it to be 12MB. Now does it do that? A lot more thinking has to go into figuring out which bits of information can be thrown away and which can be preserved to make the file that small. The more compression you put into an image the more processing is required, the more calculations in determining pixels, and the more calculations the longer it takes.