I wonder if someone can share their experiences rendering final video. It seems the process is painfully slow.
I am rendering 3.5 minutes animation clip in 720HD (did not dare to start full 1080) and projected rendering time is about 3.5h.
Is this normal at all? Is there anything can be done to optimize a project before starting video rendering?

My computer specs
Processor: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-2600K CPU @ 3.40GHz, 3401 Mhz, 4 Core(s), 8 Logical Processor(s)
Memory: 16 GB
Video: SAPPHIRE AMD Radeon HD 6870 1GB - (Latest Drivers)
Windows 7 64 bit

That must be a pretty complex scene to be taking that long, Do you have lots of particles? Physics? PhysX will not render on an AMD card, and falls back to the CPU. The graphics card is the most important variable usually for iClone. If your using lots of different textures, you may also be filling up your VRAM. If buying a fancy new Nvidia GTX card is something within your budget, it would make a big difference.

There are different rendering modes, but you lose a lot of nice things using the faster modes, like bump maps and water reflections.

It's always good to think like your building your sets in the real world. Only build what the camera will see. It robs some of the joy, but also gives a good puzzle to solve ;)

Got it Rampa, thanks.
Yes, the scene is quite large - over 50 props, countless trees /grass, a few types of particles (not all the time though), over 40 audio tracks, music/sound effect altogether. Not much physics though. And cameras are taking all around 360 degrees shooting at times.
Still would not settle for fast rendering... Guess I'll start 1080p and go to sleep :D 

Isn't iClone supposed to be a real time animation system, built on the technology of a game engine?  Why can Unreal or Unity do real time animations ala cutscenes or cinemtatics, with much more advanced and complex scenes which play out and render at actual runtime and do it with little or no degradation in performance, but iClone doesn't...?

I would certainly think about adding some/most, especially any music/sound effects, in post using your NLE. That should take a huge load off of iClone and speed things up a great deal...maybe;)



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It´s a must to deliver frame rates for game engines like Unreal and Unity, so they put all their efforts into fps in first line, I guess

Yes , they do. How?
I suggest you to download the free UDK 4 and the "Infltrator" demo level. It's very instructive and help me a lot to understand how they did this.
1- All meshes are very very very optimise with low poly and one or 2 textures map. They spend hours like Swooop do just to optimise the props.
2- UDK 4 use a LOD tech so all props have 3 mesh resolution depending the camera distance
3- UDK 4 bakes all  props static meshes shadows on texture , so the engine don't have to compute. If you move a mesh just to modifiy , you must rebake the shadow.

Using props from daz , sketchup wharehouse etc,,, that are not optimise for realtime you will have a drop frame rate for shure.... Optimising is 80 % of the job prop creation. Ask to swoop ;-)
For conclusion , I've very good result and good performance with Iclone since I use true optimize prop for game engine. Try it ! ;-)
Hope this help.

I find it interesting that I can "preview" my scene at 30 (or more) fps, but then it drops to 7 fps when rendering.

Things to consider:  When I render, I also turn on  a higher resolution.  I also turn on anti-aliasing, so in while rendering.  Both of those actions require more memory.  Also, I think iClone puts more bias into quality over real time speed when rendering.

In my experience, the biggest impact on rendering speed is staying within your video card's RAM.  I have a modest 4GB video card, and when I try to render a scene that wants 4.3GB, my rendering speed plummets.  That speaks to the optimizations that sw00000p and mkakerkart were talking about.

I suggest a tool like GPU-Z (free) to monitor the memory usage of your video card.  If the needs exceed your available memory, that is a sure-fire way to kill performance.  The same is true for your CPU, but it's far more likely to happen with your GPU when running iClone.

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iClone 7... Character Creator... Substance Designer/Painter... Blender... Audacity...
Desktop (homebuilt) - Windows 10, Ryzen 9 3900x CPU, GTX 1080 GPU (8GB), 32GB RAM, Asus X570 Pro motherboard, 2TB SSD, terabytes of disk space, dual  monitors.
Laptop - Windows 10, MSI GS63VR STEALTH-252, 16GB RAM, GTX 1060 (6GB), 256GB SSD and 1TB HDD

This means iClone is using one technology to render the PREVIEW on your monitor, and another technology to render to an image. Maybe we should ask Reallusion to give an option for WYSIWYG (What you see is what you get) so we can get fast renders for film making. Just render the PREVIEW as quick as it appears on screen.

I've rendered some videos at just over the same length, and it takes a while. I have rendered a relatively large (prop-wise) video in iClone 5, and it did well.  However, when I loaded the same file into iClone 6 and attempted to render it, the program "barfed!"  Somehow, iClone 6 just stopped working during the attempted render.  That was frustrating to say the least. Not sure why though.  Well, at least I know that I can render in iClone 5, which I will continue to use for that project for now.

Computer: Dell XPS 8500
Processor: Intel I7-3770 CPU
Speed: 3.40 GHz
RAM: 32.0 GB
Operating System: Windows 10, 64-bit