Estimate video render time from footage length and encoding speed.
Effect-heavy sections dominate render time out of proportion to their length, so a quarter of the footage can account for most of the wait. Hardware encoding is far faster but usually slightly lower quality at equal bitrate. Knowing which sections are slow is what makes proxy editing and pre-rendering worthwhile, since the heavy sections are the only ones worth caching.
Render Time
Render time = simple footage ÷ speed + heavy footage × slowdown ÷ speed
Render time = simple footage ÷ speed + heavy footage × slowdown ÷ speed Effect-heavy sections dominate render time out of proportion to their length, so a quarter of the footage can account for most of the wait. Hardware encoding is far faster but usually slightly lower quality at equal bitrate.
Knowing which sections are slow is what makes proxy editing and pre-rendering worthwhile, since the heavy sections are the only ones worth caching.
This calculator takes 5 inputs: Footage length, Render speed relative to real time, Share with heavy effects, Slowdown on effect-heavy sections, Hardware acceleration. The pre-filled defaults are a realistic starting point — replace them with figures from your own environment for a result you can act on.