A Guide To Video Rendering

I have been hired to write an instruction manual for the industry's leading editing software company. Here it is, in full:

Regardless of the speed of the system and the length of your project, rendering will take precisely somewhere between two minutes and/or nineteen hours. This is true even if you render the same thing twice.

We cannot give you an exact time for rendering as then you may end up doing something productive like going for a run, doing a painting, or finding a moment to pee. But we can promise that your edit will take no longer than nineteen hours to render (except when up against a deadline, when rendering may take three days, even when it says "35 Minutes Remaining.")

Editing uncompressed video takes a long time to render because the files are so big, therefore this takes the longest. Unless of course you are rendering a very small, lo-res file, in which case it takes the longest because we need a very long time to make everything so small. The best thing to do is to make a medium size file; but bear in mind this takes the longest of all because we need to turn uncompressed files into medium files without accidentally turning them tiny.

When the rendering is complete, you will find that your video is unplayable because the format you chose does not exist. This is your fault. You will need to render again for somewhere in the region of nineteen hours, and at the end of it your film will be complete but unfortunately there will be no audio and possibly no video. This is because you tried to format an mpeg into a mov whilst the mp4's were arguing with the avi's. Luckily, in order to help you meet your deadline, we have arranged for the producer to visit for a stern chat. You only need 47 hours to render your video.

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