I'm transcoding to DNXHD40 from R3D using an XW 8600 with 4GB of Ram on Vista 64bit Business. My source is on FW800 and I'm writing to Unity over fibre. The transcode is set to eight good with all my settings aiming for a quick conversion. I'm finding that five minutes of 4K R3D media is taking about 30 minutes to transcode. My CPU only seems to be hitting 40% max capacity while working with no other applcations running. Does this sound about right? I've read previously that upping the memory of the machine may improve things. If so if I make the memory up to 12 GB am I really going to see a difference? Getting faster processors is not really an option I'm afraid. Any help would be greatly appreciated as the time it's going to take compared to the time of got doesn't really compute. Cheers. 

Are you using a burn-in? That can slow things down. If you look at this MetaFuze speed table a parameter configuration similar to what you're doing took 7.7 times the original running time. I haven't done much speed testing with FW800 so there are only several rows on the top of the table addressing this type of source.

Firewire may be the culprit though because I have seen significant speed improvements when the source is fast, like SAS RAID for example. I have also seen inexpensive drives that use FW800 interface but are actually just as slow as FW400.

If you're suspecting MetaFuze, run a test with similar parametrers in RedCine v20 and corelate the results to times in the above table.

Thanks Igor. There's no burn in to slow things down. I'll give Redcine a go in the morning. Going back to system specs, does more memory help?

I am not sure about the memory.

I just had a thought. If you have two SATA drives in your computer, move a couple of R3D files to one drive and select the other drive as destination for MXF files and see if that runs any faster than your FW800.

It turned out to be my source drive. I did some tests with another FW800 drive and it was much faster. I've just set off the transcode with the clients drive going esata to Unity. It seems to be much better. Thanks for your help.

Good that that worked. Have to say that indeed, drive speed matters A LOT when transcoding R3D in MF.