I finally decided to start backing my videos up in an h264 format but i've run up against a wall. I've been using x264 with MeGUI but the render process seems to take forever and a day. I'm using the HQ-Insane profile on a 20 minute clip and i'm avging 2.2FPS for the video render rate. On average the first pass takes 10 minutes but the second pass ends up taking 5-12 hours for a 20 minute clip. I figure i must be doing something wrong if its taking that long for such a small clip as my system specs aren't that bad. AMD Athlon 64 x2 Dual Core 3800+ 1.5 GB of Ram DDR 400 WinXP x86 for the OS Any help you can give would be greatly appreciated.

"I'm using the HQ-Insane profile" You've answered your own question. I can make a 50 minute 1680x1050 videos take over 50 hours to encode if I set --ref 16, --trellis 2, --subme 7, and --no-fast-pskip. And that's even without using --me esa --merange 256! (use those two if you want it to take an hour per frame) Of course, lowering the above settings to --ref 3, --subme 6, and removing --no-fast-pskip will boost speed by 5-10x at about 2-5% quality loss. Don't use insane if you care about the time it takes on your encode; the benefits over more sane profiles are meager at most.

yeah im doing the same thing right now, just for the fun of it :) im getting 3.5fps and its going to take 10 hours or something stupid. If i wanted speedier output i would use one of the other HQ profiles. course it also depends what filters and such your using. when i encode to PSP format, 360x208 and much lower settings, i get 70fps for the 1st pass and 35fps for the second, so x264 can be a lot quicker if you dont use all its extra power.