Slow Compression

[mista breeze]

I just recently finished producing a 2hr and 40min video file in AVID Express and I send it to Sorenson Squeeze 4 for compressing to an MPEG-2. I'm using Export as a quicktime reference file, all the standard AVID export settings for compression, but it takes a week to compress. This seems unreasonably long and out of the ordinary, I'm frankly baffled by this outcome and hope to find an answer to this question.

Thanks

[guns1inger]

Are you doing lots effects, colour correction etc in AVID ? This will all be processed during the encoding. If you are doing a multi-pass encode then it will be processed once for each pass. Enough effects, and encoding can blow out. However even on my system I have not seen an estimate for longer than around 36 hours. I mitigate this by rendering to a lossless format first (only one pass through the effects), then encode to mpeg2. This can bring a 36 hour render down to 14 hours.