Why is my render time still huge after I reconnected the smaller versions of my files?

Hi there,

I'm working on a 2-hour documentary for a client that is due to him in two days. I shot in 1080p and altogether have about 50gb of raw footage. In a moment of stupidity, I went right ahead and edited the entire thing with those very large files referenced. As you can imagine, when it came time to render, it said would take 2 weeks. Haha.... no.

So I went back to my files and sent them through Handbrake to convert them into mp4's, using the .H264 codec so FCP would still read them. Now all the footage a much more managable 4gb total.

I threw my raw footage on another disk so it'd go offline in my project, then I reconnected the files to my smaller mp4's.. which have the same name so it was fine. They're all connected now but when I go to render, the render time still 2 weeks. Shouldn't it be much smaller now since I'm referencing smaller files? Where in the system is it still referencing my giant raw files? If I'm approaching this all wrong and need to create a new project using the mp4's, is there a way to match all the cuts and edits I made in the current project so I don't have to manually re-edit the whole thing?

Any help would be appreciated. Thank you.