I'm creating a video of my kid for the year 2015. It's currently about 2 hours and 40 minutes long. When I load a small 2 minute .mp4 video to append to the movie, it takes about 20 to 30 minutes to actually load the file, so I can edit it. I'm using an Asus 17" laptop with i7 processors and 16GB of RAM. The laptop is several years old, but it was top of the line when I purchased it. I tried deleting all of the files in the %temp% directory, and that helps, a little. Very little.
Is this slowness inherent to the large size of the movie I'm editing? Anything else I can do to speed things up? At this point it's almost unusuable.