sorry, I don't know a lot but I do know that a single AVI file with no effects rendered fine. A project with multiple avi (dvCAM) files and adobe graphic name supers with the Sony Broadcast colors effect (7.5 leinient) on the master track was what were were using to render to tape and to a NTSC DV format file.

All of the disks are NTFS and are connected through USB 2.0 and one disk is SATA inside the box. None of the media files (or temporary Sony files) are on the system disk.

Does that help at all?

So Vegas was installed in a Windows partition on the SATA internal drive?

How big is the Windows partition?

What format was the Adobe graphic (png, tif, jpg, etc.)?

Have your really checked that all tracks are at 100% opacity? (It is way too easy in Vegas to miss a minimally pulled down opacity envelope on even a single one of the tracks that makes the project take forever to render.)

Do you have all the input files on one USB drive, and the output file on another (or the same) USB drive?

That could possibly be a problem source, since USB requires the host CPU to do all the shuffling work. If your drives have a firewire option, use that instead because this interface needs no main CPU involvement at all after setup of the transfer.

Thank you for your reply.

The partition for windows on the system drive which has boot camp is 160 GB and the Mac side is about 60 GB. Sony was installed in that partition.

There is one SATA media drive and about 4 USB drives(all NTSF). The project pulls from all of them but is being rendered to another USB drive(NTSF).

The Adobe files are psd.

You need to fork the problem to see if it is related the USB drives or the media files/project settings.

#1 would be to check if there are any opacity envelopes that are accidentally off slightly, just do a search here for tools to do it automatically, this can be good to have anytime.

Next, do you have space to copy the media files to your internal HD? Perhaps even a shorter section would be enough to tell you if you're suddenly all OK.

We have found out that we can render to wmv or Quicktime OK. It's just AVI files that are giving us problems.

And there are no opacity issues.

We have also reinstalled Vegas, checked the project settings, etc. It' just weird!

The logical next thing to check is on the Mac OS X side.

Go to the Apple menu (the blue Apple in the upper left corner) and click Software Update. There was an update not long ago for Boot Camp and Windows Device Driver support. This will tell you right away if there is something newer available, and it will offer to get it pronto if so.

Did you say that the problem occurred with and without printing to tape at the same time? Could you hook up the deck to a different firewire jack?

This could be a different issue, but Vegas 6 has never worked well with the DSR-11 in terms of deck control. I used to be able to print to tape with Vegas 5, but 6 has never worked for me. I have to manually hit record on the deck.

Please also check specifically that you have dealt with the SATA performance issue that has had some mention elsewhere with Mac Pro/Bootcamp/XP. You need to roll in the remedy, assuming it is available when I write this.
Otherwise, perhaps put the media on an external drive - perhaps it is the fact that this is high duty cycle multimedia access. Does the DV file play fullscreen OK in WMP on the same (Mac) PC?

He did have the media on external drives, but USB which is the worst, especially with multiple drives and an already high CPU load during rendering. It doesn't matter what you're running Vegas on, with this configuration you are punishing yourself.

I have never heard of any problems with SATA performance, that seems so incredibly unlikely. This disk subsystem really kicks butt, it is very very well designed.

The nicest way to hook up external drives to the MacPro is through the eSATA interface. That gives a you a performance that blows USB, FW400, and even Firewire 800 completely out of the water. There are inexpensive external enclosures for this now, real beauties.

When you run XP Home, you are only able to use one of the Xeon CPUs in the Mac, because that is part of the "crippling" of the lower cost Home version.

XP Pro however (~$120 or so for OEM version bought with a flash key fob etc.) would use both CPUs on the Mac.

There are also some people writing a better BIOS emulator for Boot Camp (Apple uses EFI (a 21st century replacement for the 1970s technology in IBM's PC BIOS).

This will boost disk performance quite a bit, which is what I think was referred to in the "SATA rumor" which has nothing to do with SATA per se.

Nothing wrong in the design afaik. The statement was in regard to some very specific issues with XP living inside a Mac due to the provided drivers and/or the bootcamp capability at the time. Mac Pro remains the leading edge for OSX and is really making headlines in the bleeding edge of co-supporting XP (etc).

My suggestion was just another item to rule out in working out why there might be realtime issues with dealing with plain old DV in Vegas on a Mac Pro. Nothing more. Keep buying them and really annoy the mainstay x86 PC vendors. They need some more competition!

Very well put!

I'm also glad for the competition, especially for Microsoft which seems to have stagnated quite a bit lately.

I'm running Macs and PCs side-by-side and getting quite used to it, not a shocking difference really.