@obobskivich; Time varied considerably, as most of it was taken up with short low-res animations I often rendered at VCD resolutions to save time. This would take several hours (5 or more) to complete a 3 minute video. I remember it was hard to make it work at all but don't remember much of what I did. I used to leave it rendering to an ISO overnight and then just burn the ISO to a disc the next day.
My final assignment was a 20 minute video including some special effects, menus and chroma keying, rendering began on a Monday and was finished just in time to be handed in on Friday afternoon after I ran home during my lunch, it finished rendering shortly after I got home and I burned the image to a disc. Only 1x burning was possible and Buffer Under-run was a necessity. Windows Chicago 58 was also not a good OS for this, but was all I had.
I think the worst thing about the whole time was that I couldn't turn the machine off as there wasn't a CMOS battery and I only had one CD to listen to - The Eminem Show. Didn't help that the L2 cache didn't work.
Either way, as a video editing box, I don't recommend the 486 platform, though to its credit it got me there. Back then I hated the machine, but when I dragged it out years later it quickly became my favorite, so much so that I spent more than maybe I should to repair it when more slots on the board started dying and weird problems cropped up due to the traces being eaten from the leaking battery - no matter how much I cleaned when I got it, it kept eating itself - I did remove the battery immediately, so I suspect the fluids from it had gotten inside the board as shining a light through shows all black and green smudgy looking stuff between the layers inside the board. Overall I suspect it was better than trying to author DVDs with the SlimsPort 286 laptop which I used to take into work with me and get laughed at by the chief tech guy with his flashy P4... Joke was on him, all we used them for was word processing, some database stuff and network admin/debugging via Telnet or RS-232 at which the 286 was actually faster because I wasn't behind HAL, I also had a floppy drive whereas he had to lump a USB one around. It was fun beating his 2.8GHz with 1.5GB RAM, ATI Radeon Video monster with a measly 16MHz 286 and only 1MB of RAM, also constantly reminded him I was using less electricity and often asked if he was on fire yet.
Today the 486 (Referred to a Hooker on the network) has;
UMC U5S Super40 (Sometimes I install a PODP5V83, but I am working on a system to do that permanently).
Aquarius/Vision Tech. MB-4DUVC (Same as the JK-042A, better build quality).
STB LightSpeed ET4000W32/P VLB 2MB
SB Pro 2 (CT1680)
NEC 4x IDE CD-ROM (The DVD burner started in the P3, couldn't afford to repair the P3 in 2004, since did and returned the DVD-RW)
3Com 3C509 Ethernet card
Windows Chicago 189 (Fine as it only does file management and LAN stuff now, machine spends most of it's time in DOS)
4GB CompactFlash
It's actually very fast for a single-clocked 486.