Rendering time issues - partly resolved

I've been having a nightmare with render times in FCPX. I have an HD master video that I'm dropping into a presentation video built from templates made in motion. It was taking me 14hrs to render a 6 minute clip so I knew that something was going wrong. I used Event Manager X to close redundant event libraries and projects but it was still dog slow. What I HAVE found out that has made a massive difference is FCPX was NOT setting project properties according to the first clip. It was making my projects 1080i rather than 1080p (which neither the footage or the motion file were). I manally changed the project properties and what was taking an hour previously is now taking less than 10 minutes. I thought I should share this in case anyone else is having issues.

Interesting. I've not run into that problem before. Are you saying your clips were 1080p and FCPX was interpreting the first clip of that size as 1080i?

You dropped the Motion template into the Timeline first, didn't you? FCP X only auto conforms if the first asset placed in a new Timeline is a "video" asset. Otherwise it defaults to 1080i if it's a photo, template, graphic, etc.