How can you speed up Final Cut Express?

Hi! I have Final Cut Express 4.1 running on a PowerMac G5 with OS 10.5.8 and 5.5 GB of RAM. I have a 45 minute video and, to render it, FCE is telling me it will take 4 days. What am I doing wrong? Is there a way to speed this up? In the old days, you could allocate more RAM to an application, is that something that can be done in OSX? Maybe I am missing a setting? I’m just looking to get this video on to the web, it was taken with a high end video camera, so I imagine that there is too much data in there… Any thoughts? Thanks!