I am fairly new to Final Cut Pro and very new to using a mac pro and I am wondering what kind of export times other people are seeing specifically when exporting 720p video in h.264 with multi-pass encoding. I have a quad core 2.66 ghz Mac Pro and to export 1 min it took about 15-20 min.
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What Kind Of Export Times Are You Seeing?
- Thread starter zachsilvey
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15-20 seems right. At least your not like me exporting an hour "clip" and it's going to take 3+ hours. Seems like it's going to be another allnighter 
Is there any way to get final cut pro to use all four cores to their maximum capacity. I am only getting cpu usage of about 75%. I want to utilize all the potential of this machine, is a lack of ram a possibility for this bottleneck.
How are you exporting? Are you using Compressor? Or are you using "Export Using Quicktime Conversion"?
I was using "Export Using Quicktime Conversion" but after looking at the post below I am going to start learning more about Compressor.
Update: The bottleneck is the RAM because when I set up qMaster to use all 4 cores it still doesn't max them out but free ram goes down to 12 mb which leads me to believe that ram is the issue.
Also you can only set up a cluster if each machine has it's own serial number (bummer).
Lastly if you need a space heater just render out some HD video.
I have 2 gbs (8 more in the mail).
I had never used Compressor or Qmaster before but now it looks like I am going to set up a cluster between my MacPro, PowerMac Dual G5 and my MacBook and see what type of compression times I can get.