Regarding the other poster saying "sounds quite normal", it is only "normal" for ACMC. Processing video with iMovie is much, much faster than using ACMC. The problem is of course that the GPS features only work on ACMC. I have tried to use Garmin software (which is much faster), but the GPS format is different, which means the files from the camera need to be converted. Even after converting, the Speed in the videos seems to be off from the actual movement.
I am usually using the PC version, but the Mac version seems even slower. The issue is not the processor, memory, or storage, because I am rendering on a 6 core i9 Mac with 32GB of ram and very fast SSD, and it still takes a very long time. Looking at the activity monitor when rendering, I can see that the processor is not being heavily used. More interestingly, a video that is twice as long seems to take much more than twice as long to process, so there is some sort of Schlemiel the painter effect going on here. It seems that Sony has not tested the program with videos of more than a few minutes.
To make matters worse, there is no way to queue up videos for conversion. Adding multiple videos to the GPS view makes the software assume that you want to use multi-angle views.
All of these issues exist on Windows as well, with the added insult that the interface does not handle high resolution displays properly.
There are two work-arounds I have come up with:
1. If you have a long video and don't mind watching the computer, then convert the video in 10 minute chunks. This will mean that the GPS trail (Map) on the right side is broken up, along with the times displayed, etc. - but if you mainly care about the spedometer, then that is fine.
2. Create multiple users on your PC. Log in as user 1, and start converting one file. Next, log in as user 2 and start converting another file. Since the processor usage is low, you can easily convert 4 files at once without slowing anything down - you just need to create multiple users in order to be able to easily launch multiple instances of the program.
None of this should be necessary. At the very least, sony should release a plug-in for iMovie on the Mac and some similar software on Windows (like Vegas), rather than creating their own half-baked movie editor with such low performance.
