Make sure you are rendering to NTSC DV or PAL DV in the .avi format if you want the Video for Windows *.avi format. THis will make it considerably smaller.

dave

TI only wanted to add that I find this interesting. I read a lot of the forum to see what people do and how they solve their problems. I usually can't offer much help as some of these guys can. But,I find it really interesting that your 2 minute film is 4 gb. Mine are home video's with the video and audio tracks and a few things added in, and VV renders about 20 minutes of film to create a 4GB .avi file. I start with a camcorder digital video NTSI .avi file created during capture by VV.

Uncompressed .avi, 640x480 24 bit 29.97fps will be about 1.54GB/minute. Rendering to 32 bit will be about 2.06GB/minute. Rendering 720x480 will result in and 1.74GB and 2.32GB/minute respectively.

DV is about 225MB/minute

If you're doing a larger project - say 30 minutes of various scenes with a lot of special effects and transitions - is there a way to render a 20-30 second scene at a time and then when the final movie is all rendered in chuncks, put the pices back together on tape or CD?

Look at this script I wrote - It renders in 4 minute segments but could be modified to render in 30 second segments. It's located at:

Render Segments

As an alternative, Print To Tape renders in, roughly, 10 second segments - but ONLY the sections that NEED rendering.

dead link - can't access

"Everytime I try to render my movie, the file size of avi is about 4 GB (a 2 minute filme). If I try to generate a Divx movie the file size is smaller - BUT it takes very very long time until render process is completed" -- "What can I do? And why does it take so long to render ??? (I tried many tools, none of them rendered as slowly as Vegas Video )"

As in the other posts, uncompressed video takes up quite a bit of room - as there are many decent codecs available now days, it's common practice to use one of these to reduce the space requirements without a lot of quality loss. It takes much less time to encode &/or render to some formats like mjpeg then others that are much more highly compressed like DiVX, winmedia, real, mpg2 etc. Out of those more compresssed formats, in my experience RealVideo 9 might well be the fastest. The DV codec can be used, more often when you're working with DV cameras of course, as the color range & sampling can change going from non-DV to DV.

Vegas may render more slowly then some If/When you alter the source video, even if doing something as minor as de-interlacing (converting from interlaced to progressive). IMO you'll find this with most NLEs - double check your settings in Vegas. You might be able to speed things up if you can do some of this sort of work during the encoding process (Real & Winmedia offer deinterlacing options for example). FWIW: VirtualDub can be faster but you're giving up many (most?) editing capabilities. Other prog.s designed just for encoding can be much slower then Vegas.

If you're looking to do something like a PVR (Video Recorder), store the video without much if any editing, you can capture directly into many formats depending on the speed of your CPU, drives etc... You can use the stand-alone winmedia or real helix encoders to do this, &/or there are several prog.s that capture directly to mpeg2. Trying to do more then trim the resulting capture however will eat up any time that you've saved.

mike