Any chance in your project properties you selected
Full Resolution Rendering Quality : Best

Instead of good.
Good really is good enough most times and the speed difference can be dramatic.

certain filters (like the Median filter) are extremely CPU intensive.

The biggest factor in rendering is your CPU power. What speed are you at?

I just jumped from 800 to 1.2 GHz by installing a Powerleap CPU Upgrade. Very simple process and it only cost $169. Check out www.powerleap.com to see if your PC can accept an upgrade. And check out www.advanceddesignky.com (Advanced Design of Kentucky) if you want to buy one.

Rob

$169 for a 1.2GHz celeron is not exactly a great value...

but it looks like that web site has a guide for motherboard compatibility and stuff. if you aren't a hardware guy, then it looks like an easy way to boost a Slot 1 or FC-PGA2 System if you are currently running on a slower PIII like 800MHz or less without getting too deep into technical stuff... but upgrading the cpu by 400MHz without upgrading the rest of the system is not going to drastically reduce your render times. (but my PIII dual 450Mhz system is drooling over the prospect... and these 1.2GHz Celeron processors are available for $100... just have to find the proper Slot 1 adapter...)

but since the original poster mentioned PC800 RAM he must be using a Pentium 4 already anyway, so this doesn't apply, but maybe someone else will find it useful.

and I agree with CPU power being the biggest factor in render time for the vast majority of situations. RAM only becomes a factor if you are running OUT of it. if you aren't running out of RAM, then more RAM is almost pointless. the only time I ran out of RAM while using VV is when editing a project with many high-resolution still images in it. I would have needed at least 768MB. but most people are fine with 256.

- ben (cheesehole!)

After having my system rendering for ~30 hours for a 2 hour file (applying 3 effects to correct color and such), I am hoping that someone can provide any advice on the the impact of adding more RAM to my system.

I am running a P4 with 256 meg of PC800 ram.
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First off, guys, he has atleast a 1.3ghz proc. seeing it is a P4.
Second, Task Info will let you see how much VM your running in that 2 hour Vegas project. My total ram useage on a few 2 hour projects was around 240-300MB. So there might be a gain for you if you can not use VM. I don't think you would see much gain, if any.
Now, what format were you rendering to? If stock DV template, shouldn't seem to be a 15x render factor. But I've bogged my P4 1.3 128mb system down to 20x and worse, so it might be as fast as your proc. will grind thru those three filters. If rendering to MPEG I or something, that might be about right.
Also, what where the filters by name and how did you have them applied in the project? Clip, track or final output filter stage? I can run 1 min. region render with the same filters on a 2 hour project. See what my 1.3 128mb system does. I know the HSL filter is a render dog.
A few tips that might help.
If the filters aren't used for the full clip length, you can split up the clip as needed to save a ton of rendering. Filters force a render even if they are set to zero.
Also, if rendering to DV, set up a custom template with the rendering quality at "preview". There are only a few things that seem to render better in good vs. preview. There is no resample with preview quality, so slow montion will jitter. And the deform filter will show slight stair stepping. Other than that I can't see a differnce. Preview renders much faster, with zero loss on just about everything. Might even work with more than just DV renders?
With the new print-to-tape feature, you can use both settings as needed via "selective region renders". Prerender good sections, then print out at preview. Zooom. To mix quality settings in a file render, you would need to selective region render to a new track for the "good" areas. Then final render at preview quality setting.

Craig H.