go grab V7 or V8

go grab a dual or quad core (quad core recomended... )

grab 2 sticks of 1gb ram (winxp) or 4gb to 8 gb on vista (not that it will make much difference to rendering.. )

then.. have a nice life :) OK, well you say that a new PC is gna have to wait..

go check out the asrock 4core dual sata 2 MOBO.. it suports AGP and a IDE as well as PCI devices, BUT it also supports dual channel 667 ram up to 2gb and more importantly, quad core CPU's

Now, for me, the issue of upgrading was the onling projects and moreso the software i have instaled on this machine. It has literally taken MONTHS to set this unit up to optimal performance (SW wise) and to jsut start again, was nto an option with my worklaod.

All i did was uninstall the chipset (Intel) from myold system, then literally just shifted everything over to the new Mobo.. all my HDD's, main syustem drive EVERYTHING.

All i paid for was the XPU, Mobo and Ram. the rest is the same stuff ive had on this machine for the last 4 years or so..
I updated the drivers to Via (whichis what this board uses), updated the ethernet adaprers... no issues, reinstalled afew reg's whch chck CPU and kept moving forward
I lost abotu a days worth of work, btu thats more my fault as i was runnign numerous diagnostics..

All up this upgrade, which ha sincreased performance by at least 70% cost me $550 AUD...

I also eneded up buying a second mother board ($80) in case this one dies. Everythign else cna be replaced without afffecting the OS, but if ur Mobo carks it and u cant find a replacement, your screwed... believe me.. its happened at least twice and with teh rendering your looking at with V5, your putting more of a heat strain on your gear with excessive wear and tear due to slow renders forcing a continual longer duration spin of ur HDD"s, which not only causes wear on tear on THOSE, but also causes mroe heat

Well, there's always the old saw about working smarter, not harder (or lift with your head instead of your back).

Throwing hardware at the job would help but the external USB drive probably is a bad choice. USB hard drives incur a CPU load that will take cycles from your render. Now, the truth of it is that your render is probably slow enough that the USB overhead wouldn't be so terrible, but it'll still add time to your render.

It sounds like you're working on a system with just one drive. If all your media is on the system drive along with your system's page file, this could be a bottleneck. Definitely put another ATA drive in the system on the same PATA channel as your system drive (not on the same cable as an optical drive, another way to create a bottleneck). IF you have SATA ports in this computer, install an SATA drive rather than PATA. If you had to buy a drive, SATA is the better choice for the future.

Given the long duration of your render, I think you could move EVERYTHING to a second non-system drive. Your project spends way more time rendering than writing so I think it's kind of pointless trying to eek out a little more hdd performance.

Page file...If Vegas is forcing your computer to use the page file then that might slow things down, and if you're running everything on the system drive that compounds the problem as both Vegas and Windows may be trying to write to the drive at the same time. People give all sorts of advice about Vegas' preview RAM settings but I think an easy rule of thumb is to keep the size fairly low for your render, Given the small amount of ram in your system I'd try 16MB or so.

Try out a few tests. Select a 10 second region and render it under a few configurations to see if there's a difference.

RAM up to 1 GB? Sure! this would make a difference for just about anything you do in XP. Go for 2 GB!

But what about working smarter? Well, I think a lot of that comes from experimenting and experience, both of which will eat up more than the three hours you'll spend rendering. And that's why you ask here, to save that time figuring it out.

The one thing that comes to mind is the green screen on the TV. If this was a locked down shot then you might be able to do this composite as a masked area instead of a key, and that might speed things up. But, again, you might spend three hours figuring it out.

Moving media to a new drive isn't hard. The best way would be to pick up everything including the veg file and then copy it to the new drive. Vegas might pick up all the media automatically if it's in the same relative location, and it'll ask for the things it can't find.

Rob Mack

Two quick tests:

(1) Start the render. Open up Task Manager. Is the processor pegged at 100% in the Performance tab? If so, then you need more CPU. Either get a beefier system, or talk to a nerdy high-school kid about overclocking, which would probably add 10-30% more render performance with no downside, other than the time needed to find the optimum overclock settings.

(2) If (1) above is not at 100%, look at the Vegas process in the Processes tab. How much memory is your project using? If more than, say, 75% of your installed memory, then you need more memory. If not, ram ain't your bottleneck.