Slow rendering from DVCPro-HD to MPEG2-DVD?

Question

I have a home built PC with a quadcore 9450 chip, 8GB ram, Vista-64 Business, Mercury rendering (GTX460) - so it's not a particularly slow machine. My current project is 2 hours, 45 minutes long, shot on DVC-Pro HD 720-30P.  It is one continuous take from a concert.  I've added chapter points for each song, but otherwise have not edited it (besides mixing the audio levels.)  With CS5, to export to MPEG2-DVD (VBR-one pass, quality level 5) takes about 16 to 17 hours.  A friend with an i7 computer (which I built for him) says I need to contact Adobe because it should not be taking that long to render.  If I import the Premiere sequence directly into Encore, that render takes only a few hours (not sure of the exact time) but the quality sucks.  My 17 hour render looks pretty awesome for such a long project.   With CS4 and a similar length project, it was around 7 or 8 hours with the same machine.   Is something wrong, or is it normal for such long render times?

Answer 1

If I understand it correctly, your time-line is 2:45 (hh:mm) long and takes around 17 hours to export. Correct?
That is pretty good for a Q9450 with 8 GB RAM. Those systems are on average around 15 - 20 times slower than a fast system with MPEG2-DVD export, so it would take a fast system around 1 hour. Now that looks like a perfectly acceptable figure. You have to keep in mind that with hardware MPE you can only compare that with CS4 export times with MRQ (Maximum Render Quality) turned on, and my guess is that you are comparing it to CS4 times WITHOUT MRQ.
Have a look at the PPBM5 Benchmark and notice where the Q9450 systems are. They are all pretty close to the bottom of the list.
Seeing those results, one can argue your statement.
so it's not a particularly slow machine.
Of course much depends on your particular time-line, but if I take my benchmark results (with a lowly i7-920) versus another Q9450 system, I guess that my export times with your time-line would be around 1:06.
Maybe not the reaction you were looking for, but I can't change statistical results.
@ Colin: The OP never said he has MRQ enabled. Where do you get that from? He said he had hardware MPE enabled. And with his timeline, setting MRQ on would not influence his export times, since there is nothing in his single track time-line to profit from MRQ and it is all handled by the MPE engine. At least in this case.