Long render times!!! is this normal???

Steviee7 wrote on 10/24/2004, 2:49 PM
I captured an hour long DV tape and after adding a few text titles and crossfades between shots, I also added one 3 minute song in the middle, I added an EQ and compressor on the dialog track, IT TOOK 4 hours to render to an mpeg (main concept2) Is that normal???

I have a P4 1.6 Ghz with 256ram. I know that what I did to the audio should be easy, it's the video that eats up time...
Can I do anything to avoid long render times?
Help.

Comments

Laurence wrote on 10/24/2004, 2:59 PM
It's way faster if you render to avi then render the avi to mpeg. I don't know why but it is.
johnmeyer wrote on 10/24/2004, 6:26 PM
It's way faster if you render to avi then render the avi to mpeg. I don't know why but it is.

Is that really true? I don't think it is.
Chienworks wrote on 10/24/2004, 7:08 PM
Rendering an already rendered AVI file to MPEG may be relatively fast. However, the combined time of rendering to AVI first PLUS rendering that file to MPEG will probably be longer than a single render directly to MPEG. Vegas has to accomplish exactly the same work in both cases, and when doing a two-step render Vegas has to at a minimum store the AVI data on the hard drive and then read it back. If the intermediate file is DV then there will also be an additional DV encoding and decoding step involved. Rendering in two steps should take longer.
Spot|DSE wrote on 10/24/2004, 8:07 PM
Test it. We've been down this road before.
Rendering DV source to DV and then to MPEG is faster in most scenarios, depending on whether there is 3D, composites, etc or not. A straight DV file with a few titles and fades will render faster to DV and then to MPEG than rendering that straight timeline to MPEG in most situations.
You also then effectively have a 4:1:0 MPEG file, so it's not the best case scenario.
Render to MPEG from the timeline. It's maybe slow, but it's not MUCH slower than rendering to DV and then to MPEG unless you're working with long form projects. And the loss in quality is still a factor unless you go to MPEG from the timeline.
Laurence wrote on 10/24/2004, 8:11 PM
You know, I haven't tested this since I updated my processor, but on my old P4 2.4 the render time difference was huge. Could it be that smaller processor cache sizes really slow down "straight to mpeg" renders on an older system?