I don't think this is OT at all. We are talking about how we use Vegas...

I do both: render to new track and nesting. Sometimes when a project's complexity is high it is necessary to break it into pieces. That can apply to the rendering, not just the organization and layout. I had an HD project where a portion of the timeline included a slide show of stills. And I had another portion of the timeline with two sets of stills doing a PIP effect (at the same time) with motion pan/zoom and with some compositing/masking of some effects clips and an oval frame.

These two timeline portions were memory and render-time hogs and they increased the complexity of the whole project (lots of tracks, compositing, etc.). They also made previews nearly impossible. So I farmed out these two pieces to two separate VEG files (no audio), then nested them into the main project. This made the main project a whole lot easier to grasp and work with.

I loaded those nested veg files into their own Vegas instance and did a "render to new track". That render on its own was quite demanding. But now this complex piece was simply an AVI (inside a nested veg), imposing far less load on the main project. And since it appears as a nested veg file, it was really easy to make changes to it (just re-run the veg file and make changes, and render to track again).

If I hadn't done it this way, the total render might have failed (out of memory errors, etc.). The only downside I notice is that the "render to track" didn't have an alpha channel (I don't think CFDI has this possibility), thus you sometimes needed to put the VEG on the bottom track so that your other project elements would overlay on top of it. And the nested VEG file needed its own bottom track consisting of a generated media with broadcast legal black. Otherwise Vegas makes the rendered background with a luminance of zero (instead of "legal" 16).

Both these posts suggest that Vegas could make better use of nested Veg files:

--First of all, wouldn't it be cool to be able to select a range, right click, and then select, "Created nested Veg file"? Ideally, you'd still need a dialog that would allow you to confirm the tracks to include and to determine whether to put the nested veg into a new track or to replace media on an existing track in the range. And whether to cut the underlying media from the existing veg file.

The goal would be to make simple work of the process of creating a nested veg from an existing. Something I was suggesting back when nested veg files were first being talked about.

--Why not have Vegas do smart prerenders of nested veg files? Here's an excellent opportunity to have the material render in the background and then stay rendered even if you move it around or change it's bounds. The main thing is that you might have to specify a prerender format.

Rob Mack

Hah! This was essentially my second point. Why couldn't vegas take your nested veg file and do a prerender in the background, from the main parent project? Then you wouldn't necessarily have to "render to new track" unless you just wanted to.

Old news. I was advocating this when nested veg files were a glimmer in the user's eyes.

Rob Mack

I guess if you're using something over and over again in a project that's going to take a lot of time to render that would be an ideal situation to render to an intermediary lossless codec.

I totally would love to be able to just select the TL material and right click make nested project on new track.

Dave

Probably it's enough to be able to select a range and create the nested veg on a new track. Sometimes I don't like the idea of creating a new track, though, and might like to pick the track it lands on, especially if I'm cutting out old material in the process.

I hate to say it but a dialog allowing you to chose what gets into the new veg might be in order. Do you want the track-level effects? do you want to include all the tracks in the new veg? Do you want to have it prerender in the background? would you like to open it for rendering right away?

The reason I hate to say it is that it's not really the Vegas Way to give you a lot options to select in this sort of situation. Seems out of character, I guess.

Jayster brought up some good points about rendering in the nested veg to a new track, and having to add a black base layer. Maybe you wouldn't always want the thing automatically prerendering in the background, but rather you'd want to control it manually like he's doing.

Rob Mack

hmmm....I just done a test with prerendering and nested files. I took a very short clip (to save time for the test)...and added some very heavy FX (median...etc) to it and prerendered. I then opened a new instance of Vegas and imported the nested veg file. I then rendered it and it flew through the rendering. I then performed some cuts on the new timline...once again (except for the new cuts) it flew through the render process. I just leanerd a new workflow process since I use nested veg files extensively...prerender the original file when I'm away from the computer doing other things. Once complete I can edit away on the nested veg and never loose the prerenders and and when it is time to do final render, it will fly by....

Mark, thanks for the test! Prerender the bottom veg. Yahoo! 50minutes instead of 30 hours. I haven't used Prerenders much lately, can I select uncompressed avi?

I have never succesfully used prerenders as I always did something to them that killed them off. However with prerender the bottom veg and leaving it alone, one stands a better chance of keeping everything intact until the final render.

I belive the default template in prerendering is uncompressed....

All I know is that Avid Liquid has the pre-render thing down. It's one of the few things that I like about Liquid, but I do have to say that it's certainly nice when I was working on it for a short time.

Dave

My big objection to rendering a new file is that you lose all the references to camera-original timecode in the rendered media file. This makes it impossible to recapture in the future if you're ever trying to recreate something from the .VEG files.

I've been burned by this a few times before.

Ahh. Well, that's where the nested veg saves your butt! Because you created a veg file and rendered to a new track inside it, all the sources are lying on tracks under it. It's easy to go back to the nested veg and recapture it all.

Of course, one should test this to make sure that the final parent veg ends up with all the right stuff...

Rob Mack

Vegas nesting is pretty bad compared to FCP (and others.)
I want an alpha channel too.

Prerendering loses the timecode. Importing a 1 hour audio.veg file into my video proj takes 7 minutes of rendering. I would have preferred some Vegas type smartness to eliminate such rendering when not needed.