Long Render Times

fflowers wrote on 6/28/2005, 10:13 AM
I've been using Vegas Movie Studio for several years but just made the switch to Vegas 6. I've been reading tutorials, looking at sample projects, and trying to learn as much as I can.

I have a project with about 50 seconds of video that takes nearly an hour to render. It's taking about a minute to render each second of video - or 60 times the normal playing time length. I can't imagine trying to do longer segments. All of this is way, way longer than Movie Studio for a similar sized project.

Granted, this has more tracks than I could do in Movie Studio. That's part of why I paid to upgrade. But, even before I added some ot the tracks and it was only 30 seconds long, it was still about the same proportionally. (I think that I'll run a test with an identical project created in Movie Studio and then brought into Vegas so that I can compare idential projects.)

From what I can see, it seems like Vegas is taking about 10 times longer to render. Since MovieStudio is basically just a limited feature, slimmed down version of Vegas with a simplified UI, and certain settings preset, I can't see why the 2 products would be this drastically different.

I'm rendering my clip as an MPEG-2 stream using the normal NTSC DVD template. (I can try other formats but I'd be surprised if that made a diference.) I have a 3.20 Ghz Pentium 4 processor with 3 Gigs of RAM running Windows XP, Service Pack 2. I've tried rendering it the normal (non-distributed) way and using distributed rendering where I start 2 service renderers on my local machine. It works that way but still takes nearly an hour.

I know that there are many factors at work here that might make the rendered video from Vegas better than from Movie Stuido and therefore might make it take longer, but what can account for that much difference? There must be some settings or something that I can do to help reduce my render times other than just reducing the quality of my final output. Any ideas?

I'd appreciate any helps or tips you might have. It might help others too. Thanks.

Comments

Liam_Vegas wrote on 6/28/2005, 10:22 AM
For the same project - Vegas would DEFINITELY not take longer than Moviestudio. There is something else at work here.

Do as you suggested... take a Movie studio project and render that unmodified using V6.

As for why your V6 project is taking so long... you need to check all the usual suspects (3-D track Motion? Track/Event Opacity?)
B_JM wrote on 6/28/2005, 10:24 AM
change from "best" to "good" .

distributed rendering on a 1 cpu machine is no advantage ... ifn fact it will be slower ..

fflowers wrote on 6/28/2005, 11:44 AM
I'll try testing identical projects. I HAVE added audio panning, 3D rotating, and several other special features so that I could learn and incorporate several cool effects that I saw from other's user's sample projects. (http://www.vegasusers.com/vidshare/) I expected this to have an impact, just not THAT much.

As to the rendering times and distributed rendering, the network rendering part of the Help and the manual don't seem to have changed much between version 5 & 6. Here is an online reference to Sony's rendering guide for 5.0 which is essentially the same as the Vegas 6 Help file: http://dspcdn.sonypictures.com/whitepapers/network_rendering.pdf

Under the title "Running Multiple Instances of the Rendering Service" on page 8, it says this:

"If you have a multiprocessor computer or a computer with a processor that supports Hyper-Threading technology, you can run multiple instances of the render service on a computer."

Since my Pentium 4 has HT and reports 2 processors, then it seems like this should be faster. But, I'll run a test both ways and compare the render times. It just takes SO long to run the test. I tried running a much smaller and much simplier project, but it was TOO small to take advantage of the distributed rendering. I suspect if the project takes very long at all, then 2 services on a machine with multi-processors and/or HT is faster.

Still, there must be some good enhancement tricks besides reducing the quality, such as: "It's faster if you're temporary folder is on another drive than the project folder because there's less disk wait time." It's things like that I supsect that savy Vegas users have learned and take for gratnted that could save newbies like me a lot of time.

Thx.
Liam_Vegas wrote on 6/28/2005, 12:01 PM
The "3-D" stuff is definitely the culprit here.... That adds significantly to the render time. Sounds like you are adding lots of things to your project over what you have used in Moviestudio. There is a cost to doing this... and you have found that out (render times go up). That's not all that surprising if you think about it.
musman wrote on 6/28/2005, 1:51 PM
Don't know if this helps, but I had a project I treid to render to mpeg2 in Vegas 6 the other week that did funcky things. It was just 20min of straight video, no fx, nothing. Vegas 6 was only around halfway done rendering after 2.5 hours. Imported the footage into Vegas and rendered there at a little over realtime using the same mpeg2 settings.
fflowers wrote on 6/29/2005, 7:43 PM
My 50 seconds of video has 166 segments. So, that does explain a lot, but I still wouldn't expect it to to take almost an hour to render on a 3.2 Ghz.. PC with 3 Gb RAM. Because of other project deadlines due this week, I haven't had a chance to test identical projects, etc. I'll try to do that next week when I get back.