We’ve been doing a lot of projects with very long video sequences and multiple layers and it wasn’t unusual for the renders to take 6 or 8 hours for 1 hour sequence. We have very fast machines with i7 processors, fast graphic cards and 8-16 gigs of ram. For a long time we knew this wasn’t the way it was supposed to be but couldn’t find the answer. This week we solved the puzzle. Because our projects are very complicated and we didn’t want to lose any work, we’ve had our Premiere Pro autosave set to every five minutes. Premiere is open while Media Encoder is encoding from the timeline and what we found is that the autosave was slowing up the renders tremendously. Simply by turning off Premiere Pro autosave we got the rendering time down to 1/3 or 1/4 of what it was with the autosave on. I hope this helps anyone with similar problems.