Finally it bottomed out at 24 hours and 35 minutes!

Help!

The more effects and processing you apply to the video, the longer it will take to render. I've done a seven-minute project that takes nine hours to render on my P4-3.06, which doesn't surprise me considering that there are, among other things, two video mosaics containing 12 animated stills.

On the other hand, I finished a 10-minute project yesterday that only took about 15 minutes to render on my P4-2.5 laptop. In this case, the only actual re-rendering of video required was for the dissolves between clips and the title/credit overlays.

So, it's entirely possible to have a one hour video take 24 hours to render. Processing time should always be considered when deciding how many effects to use.

In the meantime, enjoy the enforced break... :)

Rendering is a very subjective animal. Try the rendering test on the Sundance site to see if your in the ballpark. Make sure your opacity settings are set to 100%. In my case a 30 minute video takes about 2.5 hrs to render with a P4 2.8, 800 side buss 1gig ram with hyperthreading and lots of pans and transitions and color corrections.
also some convolution kernals.

JJK

Just a thought. Have you checked that all you ram is in working order? One time I had been in my computer case to switch out a power supply and the next time I rendered to Mpeg2 the render time was waaaay out of wack. As it turns out my 512 meg simm some how got unseated. I checked in windows and sure enough I only had 256 meg of ram and so I was using virtual memory off my drive. It was a "duh" moment for me.

jack

I've had some pretty insane render times in Vegas, but a friend of mine who uses Premiere says his video's usually render in half the time of mine. Is this true, or is he just full of it?

Vegas is one of the slowerst at rendering in most comparative tests. I usually set it to render overnight while I get some sleep.
John

NO one is pointing out that you are rendering to MPEG---thats going to add hours on to any render. Rendering to avi. is much shorter even if you have fx etc. MPEG rendering is a pain in the ass-.

I'll second that

Early on I made a decision about rendering. It suits me better, anyway. Editing is easy and fun. Rendering for VCD SVCD and DVD can be a $#$%^&!@ pain in the neck. There are just SO many parameters that can be changed that MIGHT give you a better result but they might not either. Therefore, I decided to never render directly from the timeline of the edited veg file.

I firstly render the original veg file to an avi file. This will often split into more than one file if you exceed the 4GB limit. I then create a new veg file containing all the rendered avi file pieces (if there are more than one). This at least means that, if you have to do a number of renders to, say, DVD, before you get the right one, then you do not have to re-render the FX and other editings contained in the original veg file.

This, to some extent, may not save time overall, but will be less frustrating. For me it does save time because I send VCDs to some people and SVCDs to others. I will be sending DVDs soon as well. i.e. rendering all these different formats from an avi file with all FX rendered id definitely time-saving overall.

Regards,
Neil Porter

This will often split into more than one file if you exceed the 4GB limit.

Not if your drive is formatted as NTFS. Then you can render it all to ONE file.

That's true. I remember reading a tip somewhere in this forum that if you've got lots of effects, transitions, etc. it's generally better to render first to an AVI file, and then compress the AVI file into MPEG as a second step.

My guess is that the temporal nature of the compression in MPEG may require transitions and effects for a single frame to be rendered more than once in order to compute the interframe compression that MPEG uses. But that's just a guess. I really don't know for sure.

Sincerley,

Nate

Getting rid of FAT32 is a good idea!
But also if it's a big project rendering to a few separate AVIs and joining them up in a 'master' project is a good idea and then encoding from there.
How many times do you want to change just one little bit eh?
This way you don't have to re-render the whole thing.

Thanks for the help everyone. My render ended up taking 15 hours instead of 24!

I am going to try and render to AVI next time and then back again to mpeg to see if I can save any time.

Thanks again,

Steve

Steve, you probably won't save any time that way. The combined rendering times for the two renders will probably be longer than doing a single render direct to MPEG.

Where you might save time doing this is if you intend to render to several different formats. I do this often ... rendering to DV .avi for print to tape, to MPEG-2 for DVD, MPEG-1 for a multimedia disc, WMV at several different rates for website use, etc. I'll do the DV .avi render first, then render the other formats from this file. This way all the effects, overlays, titles, color corrections, compositing, transitions, fades, etc. only have to be rendered once. After that it's just encoding to the different formats.

But in your case of only making a single MPEG file, rendering in two steps will probably take longer overall.

I recall reading somewhere that predicted rendering time is based on what your computer see's when it first starts rendering. e.g., if you have a lot of effects in the beginning when it begins the render, it will predict a long time, but take much less. That explains the orignal poster's 24hr. prediction finishing in 15..