Vegas 5 took 50 seconds
Vegas 6 took 42 seconds

So it's aprox. 20% faster. It'll add up for long rnders that usually take over an hour. I just wish there was some way to speed up rendering PAL DV-AVI out to NTSC MPG2. It's 13:1 for me. For every hour of PAL source footage it take 13 hours to render out to NTSC MPG2. UGH!

How are you basing your assessment about v6 being slower to render straight footage?

Keep in mind that "rendering" unmodified footage becomes almost exclusively a function of disk transfer speed. Technically, Vegas is just copying the data as opposed to actually rendering it. Vegas will always render unmodified footage much faster if your source files are on one separate physical hard drive and you are rendering to another separate hard drive. Also, hard drive transfer rates are higher when it is reading or writing to the "outer" tracks of the drive, the outer tracks are moving under the heads faster than the inner tracks and the data can be read or written faster. The slowest disk transfer rates happen when you are rendering to the same hard drive on which the source files reside. Under those circumstances, the heads are having to hop all over the disk and head access times then come into play.

It has been my experience that Vegas 6 does render modified footage faster than any of the previous versions and it "renders" unmodified footage just as fast as any other version.

John

John, I was rendering NTSC DV-AVI out to NTSC MPG2 with no effects or transitions. Vegas 5 is faster in this respect.

I understand disc performance creating a bottleneck but it doesn't apply when both Vegas 5 and Vegas 6 are under the same identical conditions. Disk performance is ruled out as a reason for Vegas 6 being slower in this particular kind of render.

Oh, my mistake. When I saw the "straight footage" comment, I thought you were rendering from DV to DV.

I wonder if Sony has changed some of the default settings in the DVD templates and that might account for the longer render times? I'm certain that you've checked the settings and have made sure that they are identical when comparing v5 and v6 renders so, perhaps, v6 is slower on MPEG2 renders.

John

1. The more CPU-intensive the render, the less the disk performance matters.

2. For straight cuts-only edits, the disk becomes a BIG factor. I assume you know this, but for those that don't, ALWAYS render to a different physical disk. This will more or less cut in half the time taken for disk activity because a single disk cannot write and read at the same time, whereas with two disks, the reading and writing can happen simultaneously.