Here's a feature I'd REALLY like to see added to Vegas 5.0...
Real-time previews are a wonderful feature of Vegas, but once I start adding a few effects I frequently get a playback rate of maybe 4 or 5 fps... so I'll often have to "selectively pre-render" a section to see what it REALLY looks like. Which is fine, I guess. But then I think about all those wasted computer cycles, when I'm scrolling through the media bin or scrolling through the timeline or adjusting the volume on a clip... where I'm probably using 5% of the CPU's available power. Couldn't that power be put to use a better way -- as in, continually, constantly pre-rendering the project?
Hard drive space is so cheap now, I've seen 80gb drives go for $20 after rebates. An entire hour-long project (in DV, which is what probably 99.95% of Vegas users are editing in) takes up only 11gb. So you could set aside 11gb for an hour's worth of pre-render space. So whenever Vegas detects an idle moment, it could swap over and selectively pre-render a frame or two or ten or however many it can. Automatically. Just like how it saves the project for you automatically, in the background, only now it starts pre-rendering for you. So if you step away from your desk for 10 minutes, when you come back you might find that your entire project has been pre-rendered for you, and instead of getting 4 or 5 fps, you'd get a full 29.97 fps playback, even on complicated effects! If you change something, sure it'll lose that pre-render, but only until it detects idle time on the computer, at which point in the background it'd start pre-rendering for you again.
Could be a huge time-saver and a major productivity booster. What about it, Sony? Can it be done?
Real-time previews are a wonderful feature of Vegas, but once I start adding a few effects I frequently get a playback rate of maybe 4 or 5 fps... so I'll often have to "selectively pre-render" a section to see what it REALLY looks like. Which is fine, I guess. But then I think about all those wasted computer cycles, when I'm scrolling through the media bin or scrolling through the timeline or adjusting the volume on a clip... where I'm probably using 5% of the CPU's available power. Couldn't that power be put to use a better way -- as in, continually, constantly pre-rendering the project?
Hard drive space is so cheap now, I've seen 80gb drives go for $20 after rebates. An entire hour-long project (in DV, which is what probably 99.95% of Vegas users are editing in) takes up only 11gb. So you could set aside 11gb for an hour's worth of pre-render space. So whenever Vegas detects an idle moment, it could swap over and selectively pre-render a frame or two or ten or however many it can. Automatically. Just like how it saves the project for you automatically, in the background, only now it starts pre-rendering for you. So if you step away from your desk for 10 minutes, when you come back you might find that your entire project has been pre-rendered for you, and instead of getting 4 or 5 fps, you'd get a full 29.97 fps playback, even on complicated effects! If you change something, sure it'll lose that pre-render, but only until it detects idle time on the computer, at which point in the background it'd start pre-rendering for you again.
Could be a huge time-saver and a major productivity booster. What about it, Sony? Can it be done?