New to Premiere Elements 2020 - Extremely slow render time

[aland38224456]

Is it normal for Premiere Elements 2020 to estimate that it will take 120 hours to render and quick save an hour long project? That seems unreasonably long and I'm not feeling my purchase was money well-spent. I'm using Mac OS 10.15.1 on a MacBook Pro 13 inch with four thunderbolt ports (late 2016), processor: 3.1 GHz Dual-Core Intel Core i5, ram: 16 GB 2133 MHz LPDDR3, graphics: Intel Iris Graphics 550 1536 MB, and more than 100 GB free to create the 2.8 GB final file. I saw a suggestion to turn off Hardware acceleration, that made no difference after a restart. I saw a suggestion to clear the cache, no difference. It's a fresh install of the software, and this was the first project I tried to create.

[Peru Bob]

I assume you mean export, not render.

100 GB may not be enough free space.  What is your hard drive setup (how many, what kind, what is on each, and how full)?

[aland38224456]

Well, I select quick export and the next thing the interface says is rendering. That's when the timer runs up to 120 hours. I left it run for several since many apps don't estimate time correctly, and it only decreased by a couple hours. It's a terabyte SSD, and nothing else is connected. I set the cache to 10gb and emptied it. 

[Peru Bob]

100 GB free may not be enough for the system to create temporary files needed for the export. Try freeing up same space.

[aland38224456]

I freed up over 300 GB. I selected Quick Export again. At first it said 3.5 hours which seemed reasonable for an hour video, then moments later, it jumped to 6, then 16, and when it hit 18 hours I hit cancel.

[Peru Bob]

What effects and transitions are you using?

Any third party effects?

How many tracks?