Why does it take 12 hours to process a 2 hr. in imovie 11

Question

Why does it take 12 hours to process a 2 hr movie to quick time?

Answer 1

iMovie is designed to create simple home movies, not theatrical-length features.
iMovie does all rendering in a single pass when you share the movie, so the longer the movie and the more complex the effects used, it can overwhelm the memory in your computer. I would normally say keep your movies to 30 minutes or less, but there is always an exception to the rule. Some people are able to get more.
If you are able to complete a 2 hour movie in 12 hours, you must have a pretty powerful Mac. Many Macs would crash long before then.
Final Cut Pro X is the tool for theatrical length movies. Final Cut Pro X allows rendering to occur in smaller chunks, so it doesn't have to happen all at the end. When you share the final movie, you are patching together many segments that have already been rendered.
However, as I learn FCP, I have discovered that most pros do not edit a 2 hour movie on a single timeline. They create it in logical scenes, and then only put them all together at the end. They do this for performance reasons, and so in case something goes wrong, the problem is isolated. When they get ready to create their final 2 hour movie, they drag completely rendered scenes to a clean timeline and output the final movie.