This is just my personal opinion. I don't think long form projects are where Vegas shines. I know plenty have been done and done better than anything I'll ever come up with but my gut feeling is that asset management isn't one of Vegas's strongest points. That's just a horse for courses comment though. From the little I know of other NLEs that might do better for longform most of the things we take for granted in Vegas they cannot do.
So OK, assuming you are going with Vegas, how I'd go about it is to break the thing down into manageable segments, bit like how software is written. Then you have one master project that brings all the bits together. You edit each section, say for example opening titles, closing credits etc. Advantage of this approach is if you need to change the closing credits you only really need to re render them.
Now if you'd like commercial sale of your product you need breaks anyway so the whole approach actually fits together very nicely. Asset management on a longform project is pararmount, I've been badly tripped up by not following my own advice on that one. Plan this ahead. I know how easy it is to want to get started but what seems mundane now like carefully labelling and logging tapes and shots will play big dividends a few weeks down the track. A little bit of a grind up front can make the rest of the project fun instead of a daily grind of trying to find stuff.
Bob.

Bob is right on the money with the segment advice. That's one of the better ideas I've picked up on the forum in the past.

You have plenty of RAM....RAM only goes so far in speeding up the render. I have 512 and have headroom.

There was a recent link about speeding up render times and network rendering came up:

http://mediasoftware.sonypictures.com/forums/ShowMessage.asp?ForumID=4&MessageID=358628

Good Luck

I had a two hour project that was threatening to take a week to render. It was a bug in the Chroma Blur filter, and is fixed in 5.0d. There might be others, so if you aren't using the latest patch, you should give it a shot.

I posted about the chroma blur thing just a couple days ago:
http://mediasoftware.sonypictures.com/forums/ShowMessage.asp?MessageID=359948&Replies=2&Page=2

That is an impossible question to answer. If your 1 hour project is mostly cuts-only with a few transitions and you are rendering from DV AVI to DV AVI you could see almost real-time rendering - or not that far from it. If you do more extensive FX then expect it to take much longer but again it is impossible to tell you exactly how long as that will depend on which FX's you use.

I regularly do long form projects.. multi-camera... slides/photos throughout... Broadcast colors FX, PIP and I can get renders completed in a few hours.

dito. I rendered a musical that was ~ 2 hours (1:45 i think). It was a multi camera. With cc on most clips & the audio adjusted a bit, it would take ~ 4 hours to render an mpeg2. That was on an AMD XP 1800.

What I normally do (but didn't for that one, no need) is I'll edit a several minute section, save the project, start rendering that section to a new track, open up the file in another instance of vegas & keep editing. That way I have an already rendered DV AVI copy since those render faster to mpeg then a whole bunch of clips that are edited.

And farss is kinda right too. Vegas sometimes doesn't seem to flow with long projects. Sometimes. ButI didn't think Premiere flowed with anything. I've just adjusted how I work with Vegas & have gotten my system down. It takes getting used to.

I've done a few 1 hour projects that are made up of 3 or 4 sections with lot's of effects and color correcting and have no problems at all with Vegas. I basically make 3 or 4 separate projects, and then a master project that combines all 3 for output to tape or DVD. I usually export each section as a separate AVI, then combine into master project. I also have been keeping two instances of Vegas open and copying and pasting from one timeline to the other. It works great.

I also invested in a new firewire drive for nightly (or weekly perhaps) backup of my system drive and media drives. This way, if you are on day 45 in post on your new film and the system drive craps the bed, you can restore it from the previous night and basically have lost no work.

The half-dozen or so documentaries that I've done to date have been at least one hour long. The biggest project I did was 3 1/2 hours of video on a 2-DVD set. But I never have found the need to do a continuous section of more than 20 minutes or so. In this way I can treat each section as its own segment and render separately from the whole project.

I think you gain nothing by creating one enormous project on a 2 hour timeline, and then waiting until the very end of editing to hit the "render" button. If something goes wrong, it could take many hours before you realize it, and it could be difficult to find out why something failed. In other words, it might be better to break a project into a series of "intermediates" that are independent. After rendering those shorter segments I can then pull them into a new timeline along with all the other finished Intermediates and create a master avi that I print to tape as a backup. That master avi then goes to the MPEG2 encoder, which in my case is CinemaCraft.

I'm still very much a newbie at this and perhaps I'm stating the obvious, or else saying something that seasoned editors will roll their eyes at. But so far it's worked out okay.

BTW ram has little to do with it. I have done much of my stuff with 256MB of memory. What matters is disk space. The box that I'm currrently using as a nice, warm footrest below my desk as I type this has a bit over 1 Terabyte in it, and it's about 80% full. Storage is your friend.

Vegas is wonderful. I could see a person doing an enormous project with it.

Scott you should run a test tonight.

Just put an hour of video on the timeline and just make some random cuts and transitions. Add effects if you want to. Then see how long it takes your machine. Cuts only DV to DV shouldn't be bad.

The more effects and more layers you use the slower the render, some effects take longer than others. An effect where every pixel is changing, every frame, like the blur effect or median, take the longest.

Magic Bullet looks are notoriously long to render.

I cut a 93 minute documentary in Vegas and decided not to break it up. Every single shot required color correction or other tweaks and there were tons of stills with motion on them. The reasons I kept it all on one timeline had more to do with fluidity and the approvals and workflow process re the filmmakers than anything else, but I have to say that I was extremely impressed with Vegas' ability to deal with it all. And for this project, RAM was definitely a factor. Started the project with 512MB, everything was slow. Added an extra Gig a few days in, everything flew. My system is a Dual 2.0G XEON, and AVI renders took about 8 hours with the processors showing 50% capacity, and I always rendered overnight. MPEGS from the AVIs's took an additional 2-2.5 hrs. So, it can be done, and it's really a workflow issues as to how you want to do it.

I added a feature to MultiRender 2.0 to automate the rendering of long projects that are broken up into segments. For each segement of the show, add the Vegas project to the render queue with the Overwrite mode set to "Replace if Newer". Then add the master project that stitches the segements together with an Overwrite mode of "Replace".

Now when you start rendering, if the segment's project file is newer than the output file, the project will be rendered. If the output file is newer, the project will be skipped. This will reduce the time to render since only the changed segments will be rendered. The master project will then be rendered and will replace the master output file.

If any of you get a chance to try this, let me know what you think.

Randall

wow, thanks everyone.

Now I'm starting to think that I could have some kind of problem with my machine. Because as one guy said it took 3-4 hours to render his 1 hour 45 min. long project....Well It took me 4-5 hours to render my 13 minute documentary. There is NOT a lot of fancy stuff on there either. A few text overlays, pictures (some fade, some move like on the history channel), DV avi's (some fades), and all the audio is being proccessed a tiny bit (compressed and brickwall limited).

What does anyone think could be my problem?

I just tested my machine. Basically for 38 min. of DV avi, cuts and fades only (and not a lot), about 3 different files, each 15 min or so long, no changes to audio at all, about 20 minutes rendering time to ".avi, NTSC DV"

so hmmmmmm....

I would guess that a 40 minute DV with some basic stuff in it woult take about 20 minutes to render to a new DV avi.

I wonder if you have made some setting deep in the bowels of Vegas that really brings it down to its knees (hmmm... having a hard time visualising a software product with knees...). Maybe it's one of those settings where you've used the "best" setting, when "good" is virtually the same result and 5x faster.

I guess you could try and do a master reset of all your Vegas variables and then do a render again. To do that, hold down CTRL-SHIFT as you start Vegas. Then you'll be back to how Vegas was when first installed. You can make some tweaks for configuration, and then try doing a render again. I wouldn't be surprised if it was much faster.

or you could e-mail someone the veg file & thay could check it out.

I've got V4 or else i'd do it. :(

Why do you think you have a problem with your machine?

Your test rendered fine. You may have a problem with your project.
One common thing that causes unexpected long renders is if you accidentally tweaked the the opacity levels. Even if you just made the opacity 99% it takes time. The other thing is your pictures, how many are there? What size are they? Super-megapixel images soak up a lot of memory.

Check out this post by John Meyer
2. Make sure you haven't "nudged" the opacity or volume level for any event, and that all your track levels are at 100% (unless you actually wanted to change them). I wrote "audit" scripts that will check this for you automatically: Audit Scripts

What format are you rendering from and to?

hmm, you're right I coudl have done some stupid little things that make it rediculously long.

usually it's rendering from dv avis (and those pictures, 16-bit and 24-bit audio files..some of each). Rendering TO is either output for DVDA or another DV avi, occationally a .wmv or something for the net.

I'll check out john meyer's program.

oh oh, and...render to a different hard drive..really? that's an awesome tip, i'll have to keep it in mind....

and, is "smart resample" an ok setting for all the clips?

I remember in V4 I ALWAYS had to do "reduce interlace flicker"on all video and picture files or else the video came out really choppy and just overall not good...ha. - is this nessecary on V5 now?

finally - who can tell me some differences between BEST vs. GOOD....I'm not sure I can tell the difference all the time...ha! (I'm using a sony minidv home video camera..haha..nothing special..got it used for 400, new its like 750 i think..1 CCD).

OK... heres some thing to try.

Have you used any of the 3-D track compositing mode ANYWHERE on your timeline? Doing this adds a huge amount of rendering time to the entire project even if you only have the effect active ona few events.

You say you have got some photos on which you are doing some pan/crop work. Photos CAN add alarge amount of time for rendering.. as EVERY single frame needs to be "rendered".

Just how much (of the timeline) are we talking about related to these photos?
How big are those photos (pixel dimensions)?
What format are those photos in?(TIFF adds a lot of time).

What is your RAM Preview buffer set to? This has a large impact on the speed of rendering (would you believe it) - it slows down a huge amount if you set this to zero. Usually any number above 16MB should help a lot (mostly people have this nunber set quite high - but there are legtimate reasons sometimes where you may WANT to set this number to 0 for some third-party plug-ins to work properly)

One cause of long renders I've found, if you've got a few tracks of titles say at the start and those tracks are empty for the rest of the T/L Vgeas still has to check each one of them to see there's nothing in them and things slow down.
That's one good reason to do it in bits. Render out the opening and closing titles to new AVIs and bring them into the master project or whatever.
It's not so much the render time that's a drag, it's having to wait all that time everytime you make a change so doing it in sections can speed your workflow no end.
Bob.

I render to the same HD (laptop 7200RPM) with 512MB RAM, and though my Proc is faster than yours 3.2 P4HT 800MHZ FSB. I can't fathom how it takes soooo long to render, unless you're doing some crazy filters, MASS compositing, or both on your clips. I render DV AVI to DV AVI in halftime or less with little or no filtering.

One of the reasons that I love Vegas is that it has saved my butt, on ocassion, by letting me work through what I need to do, so quickly and drop it out to an External HD for transport to the customer soo fast.

Dave