Oh good I am not the only one!

Yeah - I too found the rendering with the Sony AVC codec is slower.... I use the AVCHD preset most of the time.

Cheers

"I still had the 32 bit version of 9.0c installed... With that version, the same render takes just over an hour. What has been done to the render pipeline that makes it 3 times slower?!?!"

Thank goodness (for my needs), converting in the reverse direction is FASTER. I loaded a short .MP4 file onto the TL and rendered with Cineform codec in both 9c-32 and 9e-64. I tried it with one thread in both, then 4 threads in both. I consistently got better performance with 9e, even though the CPU usage was relatively low with each.

Of course, it would have been better if I had compared either the 64-bit version of 9e to the 64-bit version of 9c (or compare both 32-bit versions, but I don't have the time to re-install 9c and do it properly, and they go back yet again to install 9e for my future work. In any case, it appears that 9e-64 bits is pretty good for this type of rendering - 9e always was at least 50% faster - even better than that when plugins were applied to the clip.

Just repeating old advices regarding render times and cpu usage. :)

Render to a different drive (not just another partition on the same drive, that'll make it worse) than the one the source is on.
Set the temp dir on a third drive if possible.

"Render to a different drive (not just another partition on the same drive, that'll make it worse) than the one the source is on. Set the temp dir on a third drive if possible."

Right on - I'm fanatical about such things. Moreover, I put all my stills on one disk, all my clips from Camera A on another, and from Camera B on a third (most of my work is 2-camera studio projects). That way, there is no thrashing of the drive head during cross fades and other transitions. It goes without saying that I always render to a fourth drive.

I disconnected a little-used drive yesterday, but I just counted the remaining permanent drives: 10 (plus DVD burner). Plus, at the end of every day, I hook up 3 backup drives that I keep in fire-proof safes on the floor so that I can backup the day's work. I do all of this as a consequence of lessons learned the hard way.

Slow render due to drive thrashing is completely unrelated to the problem I am reporting! The identical project on the identical drive takes 3 times longer to render. This is because Vegas 9.0e takes three times as long to process each frame. This is because they have changed the code and made it more inefficient.

My confusion is why this was done. Is Sony even aware of what they have done?