[MacDV] Rendering in FCP (Latest)

[carlian]

I was having problems in having to re-render quite a bit of footage  
each time I reopened a project in FCP 6.0 and "sb"  suggested I reset  
my scratch disc and other settings.   Either doing this, or  
installing the recent upgrade to FCP 6.1 seems to have recitified the  
problem, thank goodness.

Despite running the latest version of FCP on a 2 x 2.66 GHz Dual Core  
Intel Xeon with 3 GB of RAM I am finding rendering is still a time  
consuming affair.  Is this par for the course , or are there some  
things I can do to speed rendering up?

TIA,

Ian Tucker