30+ Hours to Export a 6-minute video in Premiere Pro?

Maybe you figured this out already, but in my case my 1 minute video was saying that it was going to take 30 minutes to render....  not acceptable.  For me, the problem was that I had basically "Ping-ponged" the current 1-minute video project off of at least on other project file that was ENORMOUS.   The giant project contained almost 400gb of footage that I had just imported from multiple locations on my main 8tb drive and would eventually consolidate down to a final "project mixdown folder" that ended up being only about 20gb.  For the one minute project, since I had used the gigantic project as the asset base for the small video, it was having problems rendering the 1 minute video in less then 30 minutes... I don't know why this is the case if it's only rendering what's on the timeline, but I basically had to go through and delete all the access imported footage, audio, assets, mographs or anything I wasn't using in the 1 minute project.  Afterward, the gigantic project's size was decreased significantly and the 1 minute video only took about 1 minute and 30 seconds to render out.  Again, I don't know why this was an issue especially since I have had huge projects like this before and not had any problems, but this solved the problem for me.  Hope this helps someone.  

@safeharbor. Okay. I'll try that. Right now I'm attempting to upload the whole project folder to my Google Drive, 1.67Gb and don't want to interrupt it by doing anything intensive online. Google says about 5 hours to upload at my blazing fast Centurylink upload speed of 0.69 Mbps. Yup, definitely tech-challenged here, lol. Hopefully, the estimate will go down after it's chewed through some of the bigger files, but if not, it will be time for a Starbucks run to upload it there. Then, I'll go do handbrake.

UPDATE: omg, you're right. The frame rates on some of these are off, 29.98, or 30.00, or 30.xx, 28.xx, etc. 

UPDATE #2: Just ran every clip through Handbrake, removed the old clips and replaced them with the new in the timeline. Estimated time 29 hours 50 minutes for export. 😞 Darn, I was really hoping that would do it.

Right-click each phone clip (or Mac-equivalent) in Project Bin and select Properties, and that should show the frame rate. If is it anything odd like 30.01 or 26.8 or whatever and not 29.97, then probably variable frame rate and probably causing trouble.

In the Handbrake converter, you IMPORT the phone clip, ADD TO QUEUE, and set up for H.264 with CONSTANT frame rate of 29.97 and then start the export which create a copy of original file, but with constant frame rate, ready to edit in Premiere.

Thank you, everyone, for your input. Okay, I'm going to try and answer some of your questions. Destination drive still has 300Gb of open space, so I don't think that's an issue. The finished file is estimated to be half a gig. I can try exporting it to a 1TB Seagate drive I have, though I'm not sure that would help? That's the drive where I transferred everything while trying to render it from an external (my Mac was still revving up the fans so much that I was worried what 30 hours of that would do, and hit cancel).

Here's the link to the opener: https://videohive.net/item/winter-titles-premiere-pro/25045449.

I was able to get most of the opener to successfully render after 3.5 hours-ish, but I also tried rendering an equivalent segment of the video from the middle and render time was still as long. 

The bits from the smartphones...people threw all sorts of things at me. I did my best to weld them together into something cohesive. You've lost me, though, with part about transcoding. I'm sorry, I'm a Photoshop geek. The closest I've gotten to videos is watching them, so I'm a newbie. Everything looks really clean in the timeline, though...?

I checked to make sure all clips were 29.97 before trying to render. At least that's what they say when I bring them up in the program.

I'm with Neil on the phone footage and forget to post that! Many if not most newer phones now record using Variable Frame Rate, and that can wreak havoc on the editing. If the source clips are not a constant frame rate of say 29.97, then they need to be converted to such before editing. The free Handbrake software works well.

Bad idea using Preview Files when exporting to H.264. It is using a lesser codec.

I'm with Meg. Yea, that's a rather low-powered system, and 8GB of RAM means Premiere is barely able to operate.

That said ... this looks like something is not right. Two to three hours I could see ... over twenty ... not. My one quibble is I'd use the "Adaptive bit rate" options and that might make a few minutes difference with no difference in image quality. But shouldn't make THAT much difference.

Now ... the bits from smartphones ... perhaps if that was transcoded to say Cineform or ProResLT prior to working, might help some. You might test by transcoding a few clips, create a new sequence with some of your graphics, and export say 30 seconds sequence of that. Check comparative times.

Neil

Can you post a link to the opener in Envato?

That opener may have some very intense effects causing the long expor times.

How full is the destination drive? Something is dreadfully wrong here!

Can you export to an external drive, like a USB 3.0 model perhaps? Is ALL your media/project/export on same hard drive?

If you do have a fully rendered timeline, with a green bar all the way along the top, then:

Make sure Use Maximum Render Quality is unchecked  and Use Previews is checked and export:

MtD