Well, you can open up multiple vegas sessions. Have you tried doing this and just do a "Save as" on each and let your computer plug away on them? Probably not as nice as have one "Save as" button, but this might work, or your computer just might come to a screeching halt? Not sure how, practical opening 20-30 vegas sessions would be.

Yeah, I'm not too sure about that one. Especially since each .veg file has 2 or more tracks and a couple of EQs riding on 1 or more of the tracks - not to mention the MANY edits in each file, including some fancy crossfades, volume changes, etc.

I looked into the new Batch Conv. but it only looks for media files, of which .veg is not included.

JL
OTR

The multiple sessions will work fine, at least up to some number of them anyway. You're really only limited by RAM. Of course, the total rendering time will take as long as if you did them all sequentially, but at least they'll all run at once and you can go away and do other things. I've had 8 video renders going on simulaneously with 256MB of memory. You can probably get many more audio only renders to run all at the same time.

Told ya so...told ya so...told ya so... Nahhhhh :-)~

Well, if you're right......then I should be able to do quite a few since I have 384Meg & these are all 44/16 Mono files.

The other thing, though, is that there's no way to know how long each one will take (since they are all different lengths) & I don't want to load up on sessions only to have them finish in 2 or 3 hrs. That way, I can't set it up to run all night & 2 or 3 hrs. is too long to tie up the DAW during the day. Seems like there's also the possibility of losing track of which ones have/have not been done.

This may be my only alternative though. Crud!

I put in a word to SoFo on this. It'll be interesting to see what they say.....

Do I hear a new update to B.C. in the works?

JL
OTR

Well I got my answer from the SF techs. Here is what they say......

Q) How well will this scenario work:

Can I create multiple instances (how many?) of VV3 and in each one set up a
.veg file to render to the appropriate format, start the process on one - go
to the next, start it - go to the next, start it - and so on. Will the
render process be reliable with several going at once like that? Also, will
it slow things down considerably over trudging thru them 1 at a time?

A) Well, if you are going to go there, then here is what I'd suggest. I do not
recommend working with multiple instances of Vegas open at the same time.
You can open two, then transfer projects from one to the other if you want
to paste more than one .veg together. But to ask the app to actually render
from separate instances is going to give you a crash, I'm almost certain.
Just one instance doing a render is going to be using most of your resources
anyways. In the BC it hits them one at a time, it just does them
automatically one after another. It doesn't render them all at the same
time. If these projects were all single track projects, you could open the
multiple projects into separate tracks in Vegas, meaning that every project
is on its own track, then you can go to File/Render As/.wav, and from the
template menu choose multiple stereo files. This will render each track out
to a separate file. If you choose Single Stereo then it mixes all the
tracks down to one.

I really think the only way you'll be able to get the job done without
problems will be to chug through them one at a time. Sorry.



So there you have it....

JL
OTR

I've heard the SF deep techs that visit this forum say it's possible, in the past. >Especially< relating to solely audio projects, I think it's more than worth your effort to try!

-Doug

I agree. Go for it. It works well for me, and the worst that will happen is that you lose one night's worth of rendering time. It can't possibly damage your projects, so there's no risk involved. I've actually found it to be faster to render multiple instances at once rather than sequentially. I assume this is because the computer gets closer to a 100% processor load than when only one render is happening.

yeah fire off as many instances as you need and set each to render. I have not seen any reports of multi-instance crashes so you should be ok there.

Have you noticed any difference in the audio quality in rendering one at a time vs. many at once? In other words, is multiple instance rendering reliable?

How many instances have you successfully handled at once?

Thanks.
JL
OTR

It should not affect the quality of the render at all. The # of instances are dependent on the content of the mixes and the performance of the machine. The higher the track count plus CPU intensive plug-ins will affect the performace. Eventually the system will slow to a crawl as it chews all the data but it will eventually finish and your mixes should end up fine.

Sounds encouraging.

I would like to hear from some users about their REAL WORLD applications & how it REALLY worked. No milk & honey, please - I want it straight up.

JL
OTR

Well, i've already related my real world experience so i won't repeat it again.

I will note one other thing though that i discovered through experience. It's a lot better to open up all the instances and load the projects first ... THEN start the renders. Once you have a few renders going it can take an enormous amount of time to launch another instance. How many can you open at once? This is something you just have to experiment with on your own system. Watch the project load times and the responsiveness of mouse clicks. When it starts getting sluggish, you've probably opened enough.

Once again, go ahead and try it. Then you'll have your own real world experience to go by.

>>I will note one other thing though that i discovered through experience. It's a lot better to open up all the instances and load the projects first ... THEN start the renders. Once you have a few renders going it can take an enormous amount of time to launch another instance.<<

Yeah, I already figured that.

>>Once again, go ahead and try it. Then you'll have your own real world experience to go by.<<

Actually, what I'm looking for is reports of how the renders turned out by doing them this way. Is the sound quality/integrity the same as it is rendering one at a time? or does it suffer in some way? Have any of you guys ever done it both ways & compared the results?

I'm asking all of this because I'm getting close to finishing all the editing on this huge dialogue project I'm working on & I just wanted to see what will be the best way to tackle rendering the enormous amount of files I have.

Thanks for the replies.

JL
OTR