"this had more effects than usual"

There's your answer right there. Some of the effects increase rendering time by an order of magnitude.

One project i was working on was about 10 minutes long. Near the end there was a 4 second section with a velocity envelope, B&W, film effects, color curves, and gaussian blur. Up to that point took about 25 minutes to render. Those 4 seconds took about a day and a half. Then the last 20 seconds took another minute.

When i had to work on the project again i selected just that short section, removed all effects, rendered with with just the velocity envelope to a new uncompressed file. Then i rendered that new file with just one of the effects to another new file, and so on, through individual steps for each effect. This only took an hour or so, certainly much shorter than when everything was being done at at once. Then i dropped the final version back into the original project replacing the original material. New rendering time for the complete project was about 25 minutes total.

Well, I guess I suspected...
this is, by far, the most ambitious (effects-wise) project that I have done. Thanks for the feedback. It is good to know I am not alone. I think the rendering in parts will be on my agenda for the next project.
CK

For me, it's the Magic Bullet filters that account for the long waits in rendering

a 1hr. 10 min movie, re-rendered with color correction using Magic Bullet plugin is still going strong after 70 hours. 91% right now. Worth the wait? We'll see... :)

Those fancy plugins entice the creative side don't they?.
But when render time comes and you have other projects stacked up and clients waiting and the phone ringing with more business, and you're running out of computers,--- you get creative in another way. Searchng for ways NOT use all those fancy FX you paid all those bucks for.

You might find this information useful in deciding which (Vegas) fX might be slowing things down:

Results of render times for ALL Vegas fX

In addition, compositing, track motion, bezier masks, supersampling, track motion blur and other things can also significantly slow things down.

If you are NOT using still photos in your project do NOT use the "Best" setting for your rendering. This will slow things down significantly, and for video (as opposed to still photos) will not improve the quality of the result.

I guess you guys didn't hear the news - they've decided to change the name of the "Magic Bullet" to "Magic Slug" - should be official as soon as they try using it for the first time.

Dave

Sounds like "Bullet Time" would be more appropriate.
Bob.

AMD has a new chip out - The Opteron 252 - runs at equivalent of 4.7 GHz or so Xeon - Maybe a dual processor model with 8GB RAM for all these effects? Anyone got a spare $10K?

Whatcha'll think?

<g>

I think 10 years from now we're going to look back on these topics and laugh. We'll be more concerned about why our 3.5 hour holographic 3D project took a whole 7.5 minutes to render!

.. in 10 years time I wont remember the QUESTION! - G