iMovie Export Time Excessive?

Hi,

It's good that you were able to share out a 4K 60fps video. Most people have been unable to do that.

A lot of factors determine export time: frames per second, resolution, size of the project, bitrate, compression settings, the speed of your processor. If you share out at Best Quality (pro res) you will get a .mov file that is about 4x larger (and 4x slower to export) than than if you shared out at only High Quality to an Mp4 movie. Your movie is large at 2 hours duration, and it has high 4K resolution in addition to a high frame rate. Depending on your other settings, 8 hours might well be normal. The export time estimates are not very accurate.

-- Rich

It is hard to say what is "normal" export time, since every movie is different. Even at High Quality export setting, there are a lot of factors in your movie that point toward a longer export time. You might try experimenting with a test project at lower resolution and more compression and see if you are getting very long export times.

The good news is that it is sharing out, albeit slowly.

-- Rich

Here's another thing you can try. Although it is not common, you might need to reset your System Management Controller. Slow performance can be a symptom of that. Fortunately it is very easy to do. Here's a link that explains how to reset the SMC for your computer model and also gives a list of things that you can try before resetting it:

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201295

-- Rich

You are welcome. :)

-- Rich