Hi Bill,
Thanks for the input. I tried making a compound clip out of the entire timeline. That didn't work. Then I added a broadcast safe to the compound clip so that it gave FCPX something to render to a new file. That didn't work, either. As I mentioned, it renders out just fine on my Mac Pro. So, I really think it's isolated to some issue on my system (what that is, I haven't a clue).
Also, the timeline is pretty basic. It is just under 4 minutes. There are some titles and there are some stacked dissolves at the end of the timeline, but only 2 layers worth. So if there was a slowdown you'd think the progress bar would go further before stalling.
I haven't tried new footage yet. But I will later on. I have been teetering on reinstalling the OS on the laptop just to see if it improves general performance and not necessarily to fix this problem. So might do that sometime next week and hopefully it will be a nice side effect of a fresh install.
Will try out some new footage later to see if that does anything. It's just getting stuck. The time keeps increasing. Adobe Media Encoder takes 8-12 minutes to render at the same settings.
Michael Garber
5th Wall - a post production company