Isn't this what overnight rendering is for?

I've encountered many cases of people (not implying you, Bob! I'm referring to various, nefarious, and sundry others i've dealt with over the years) who balk at a long procedure and hunt after faster alternatives. Usually, more often than not, by the time they've found a faster way, they could have completed the slow method several times over.

"Very many hours" isn't specific, but let's choose a nice round figure for convenience sake, say ... 60. Start the thing rendering Friday afternoon when you head home and it will be done and waiting for you when you get back Monday morning. For that mattter, lots of my animations take hundreds of hours. I let them run in the background under low priority day after day, week after week. They eventually finish, and then i go on to the next.

Cui-Bono....
If you have my Vegas 5 book there is a 30 demo. If you don't, go download it from their site. It does a REALLY good job of converting and importing.
ProTools is slow.

Here's whats scared me off:

1) It's on a portable HFS+ volume but I believe I can get a utility that'll let me mount the drive.

2) It's over 20 hours of audio, the result of 100s of hours of studio time.

3) It's a project of some enduring significance.

4) I figured I could probably get an EDL export / import however how do a I get the FXs to work the same? The project I'm told has quite a few tracks with fades, compression, reverb etc.

5) I don't have the monitoring facilities to really check it properly, I mean if I know for a fact that the Protools Plate Reverb (or whatever) is exactly the same as the one in Vegas then fine, if I'm trying to match a Protools FX against the Vegas one, yipes, I mean even if I had a set of Genelecs the same as these guys I'm still relying on my ears against theirs.

So OK, I'll give Cui-Bono a whirl, I'll have to find a Protools project from somewhere just to convince myself it'll all hang together.

And many thanks guys for the input, I hope I can pull this off.

Bob.

I'm not clear on whether the project finished, audio-wise. Or will you continue working on audio in Vegas? If it's finished & he''s done his part, of course he should render out either a mix or stems for you. If, on the other hand, this is a case of you taking up where he left off, you have 2 choices: 1. He renders out his effects to 1 or more stereo stems, then HE renders, track by track, all of the relevant material for you to import into Vegas. This puts the rendering burden on him; 2. If this is a billable time/dollars issue, there are a few utilities out there that can convert ProTools sessions into EDLS for multiple platforms. They cost $$/$$$, but if it's a service you can charge for,it may pay for the software. Here are some links:

http://www.avtransfer.net/

and

(you already know this one):

http://www.cuibono-soft.com/Products/EDL_Convert_v4/edl_convert_v41.html

Here's something to think about, however. Producers who know something aboutDAWs believe that ProTools is so ubiquitous that they shouldn't HAVE to pay for rendering-out time or conversion services. They think you should just have ProTools. Also, in production circles, the term "ProTools" has become the "Kleenex" of the DAW world. Producers who don't know any better say "ProTools" when they mean "DAW." Until there's a conversion issue to another platform. Then they learn it is only one of many platforms.

The CuiBono won't convert everything...That's the rub. It does a great job though.
Can you do a transfer to a firewire drive so you don't have to worry? His Mac will accept your NTFS drive with no problems.

To be more specific. The project is completed but the delivery format is mp3. Clients engineer doesn't fancy the task of entering 100s of tracks worth of tag data and has never encoded to mp3 before.
I suggested he just render out as say 16/48K files and burn those onto DVDs and hand them over to me.
Except he says the render will take so long he might as well go straight to mp3 himself.
But after I got off the phone a cold shiver went down my spine, from what he said the ONLY format this stuff, which has cost serious money to produce, is going to survive in is mp3! How do I politely tell his boss the implications of doing that.
Bob.

Can you break into his office at night and back up his hard drive? ;)