I let the render finish yesterday and it turned out okay. The total time was about 4.5 hours.
Had some time to play around with it this morning and do some more tests. I noticed yesterday that the second half of the video exported a LOT faster, and I realized that I had some positioning and scaling effects on the first half that I had forgotten about. So that part's my bad- I guess this particular video did have a little more going on than my usual videos. I do want to try to get to the bottom of this though- relatively simple position/scaling effects don't feel like they should cause Videopad to take 1 hour to render 1 minute of footage.
Do I need to purchase again to update to the latest version? If not, how do I do this?
I have two: An older Radeon HD 7900 series, and a much newer Radeon RX 480. The older 7900 is still a powerful card, but the newer RX 480 has significantly more bus width on my system. Drivers are up to date.
Thank you! This made a HUGE difference, despite having two very good graphics cards. I had hardware acceleration turned on for the 4.5 hour render. This morning I tried again with it unchecked, and it was significantly faster: Only 1.5 hours, and it (mostly) uses 100% of my CPU! Much better, although it still slows down considerably during the first half of the video, where the position/scale effects are. During that section, it goes down to about 20% CPU usage. Still, that's a huge improvement. I'm going to try to avoid effects when I can in the future, to speed things up.
Yes, the rest of the CPU was idle during this time. As I describe above, even with hardware acceleration turned off, the CPU is mostly idle and rendering becomes slow when rendering parts of the video that use any sort of effects.