Unlike some things I think the dual P3 is giving you nothing over a single P3, certainly on my 2.4G P4 things aren't that bad. I've done encodes over a 100Mb network and that deson't seem to make any difference. Bear in mind also you are rendering and encoding in the one hit, lots of numbers to crunch.

I'm looking at a P4 HT 3.06ghz. What are your thoughts, Farss, on the potential rendering performance? - I know we've been here before - but still would like to know . .. oh yes will probaly go with 1ghz of fast RAM. I understand that thram might not make for faster renders - or is this true? Can one set up the RAM to become more efficient/faster on renders?

Best regards,

Grazie

From what I can glean HT will not improve render performance and extra RAM will not either. You could use the xtra RAM to have a bigger disk cache but disk throughput doesn't seem to be a bottleneck anyway.

The faster processors will peform better and the faster FSB and dual access memory will also help but were not talking doubling the performance just incremental gains of 10 to 15%.

For HT to work you need to run XP and the code has to be able to split its operations into separate sections that can be assigned to each virtual processor. As rendering is a linear process there is no way to do this. Encoding is a different matter, each part of the quantizing matrix can be assigned to a different processor. I don't know if this applies to the MC encoder, it does to TMPGEnc.

Having said that though if you want to run mulitple apps then you will see a benefit, a recent test I saw involved doing a render and a virus scan at the same time. Both completed in much the same time regardless of whether the other task was running or not.
The other plus would be if running multiple instances of VV, something that interests me as I do a lot of format transcodes with little or no editing involved. With a HT machine I can have two renders running at once. The one I'm running at the moment is going to take 9 hours, if I had a HT mobo I can do two in the same time, BUT I wont be able to do one in half the time!

So your best bet is to go for maximum number chrunching ability, what takes so long in a render are the fx/transitions. Th render engine has got to visit every pixel on every video track and apply the calcs to it and possibly its neighbours as well. If you're changing frame rates or resolution its got to create extra pixels or frames as well. IMHO the remarkable thing is how fast renders are!

The only time extra disk subsystem bandwidth is going to help is on straight renders which are just frames being copied. Its a lot of data being moved with no calcs performed in the middle, so if your video is mostly drama type stuff with straight cuts or dissolves then this might make things a bit better. If you've got lot of video tracks and effects it will not help.

I can add to this.

A LOT of drives, including IBM's latest, are not repairable should the slightest hard error occur. I don't even want to talk about this I am so fed up, but take a look at my review of SpinRite on epinions if you want all the stinky details. http://www.epinions.com/content_88139468420

Anyway the conclusion is to use hard drives whose manufacturers offer support utilities to completely lock out hard errors. This keeps the computer from using 99% of it's time trying to write to problem drive areas. No kidding -- that's what your problem probably is.

From my experience I have settled on the latest Western Digital drives, use dedicated units via firewire connect only, and then move files and product to DVD (multiple for backup) for storage.

Hope that helps enormously

Many have said that you'll get to where you want to get much faster if you first render to a DV avi file then reload and render to an MPEG II file. Nothing to worry about quality wise because the Sofo DV codec is so clean.
Also make sure you don't have any video tracks video level sliders set less than 100%, unless you wanted that for titles of something. Track fx can also slow down renders. If you only need the fx for part of the track and other events after don't need it, you'll want to make two tracks. This is because even though a track fx keyframe can be set to "no effect", it'll still bog your renders.

Craig H.

Yep that is what i do. Render to avi then to MpegII. This is only anecdotal experience but it just seems shorter doing it this way if you have a lot of mixed media.

Gracie:
Just upgraded from Win2k to XP Pro and also to Matrox Parhelia
and Intel D875PBZ board with P4 2.8 800 side buss and DDR400 1 gig ram.
First thing I noticed was the preview was clearer and did not jump with FX
applied but did jump with more FX's applied. Rendered a 37 minute slide show
with no fades between and medea titles on each picture in about two hrs to
mpeg2. (6 hrs before with p3 1 gig). The processor is set for hyperthreading
but am not using the Sata serial stuff yet. (XP only). Capturing was piece
of cake but never did have trouble with capturing. The next thing I noticed was
that the processor temp went to 167 F and shut down so bought a super cooling
fan and about three more case fans and now OK. Sum total is that this thing
flies and for some reason the video is clearer and sharper. The video card
can feed three monitors at the same time you are looking at the preview on
the firewire ADVC-100 converter link. Had to also update the Matrox drivers
as the ones on the disc were malfunctioning. Also updated the Power DVD
driver. Am very happy with the increase in performance. Also had to copy and
paste two Netbieu drivers from the XP install discs in order to communicate
with two other computers with Win2k systems. Using the built in lan connection
for networking on the Intel board. Also downloaded and installed the latest
Motherboard bios. Very happy.

JJK

24 hrs to render 1.5 hour video....that sounds about right.

It just took me 18 to do 45 minutes.

One of my projects is going right now, it's about an hour long, and my computer has been crunching it for 7 hours. The ETA clock has about 1 1/2 hours remaining.

My computer, homebuilt, AMD AthlonXP 2400+ can do a 2 hour DVD in about 7 to 8 hours.

This is after rendering my Vegas projects to an AVI file, then putting the AVI files into DVD-A.

Also, I am only running the 266 FSB. I keep my drives defragged with Diskeeper.

Also, I can do a 1.5 hour TV program DVD (Mystery Science Theatre 3000) with just a few crossfades to cut commercials, no effects, in about 6 hours.

I just rendered a 1 1/2 hour air show at mpg.2 and ac-3 in just over 2 hrs. 10 minutes.
I rendered in Vegas 4. I have an AMD Athlon XP 1500 with 1 gig of ram. It never has
take very long to render. I can't imagine why it would take someone 24 hours to render
1.5 hours with such a fast computer. That would be depressing. I hope that you find
out what your computer problems are so you can get to faster renders.

Dwuane

Adding to what's been posted, FWIW and all...

Resize slows things down a lot. Full frame most always takes longer then 1/2 or 1/4, just as 29.97i takes longer then 29.97p, & longer then 23.976p.

Having the drive that holds your source defragged helps, and rendering to another drive (not the one with the source) helps a little bit. Turning off anti-virus software helps, as does turning off some processes if you're in xp. Make sure UDMA is turned on for any drives supporting them, and use faster drives (7200 minimum).

You are lucky. I have had files with SO much applied to it, every correction imaginable, that one hour took 36 hours to render. I quickly (?) learned to not DO that. Now they render much faster.

As far as extra RAM, seems it doesn't help much to have a ton of it unless you are using it for RAM Caching, Vegas RAM Preview, or still-photo editing, or multi-tasking.

I understand that some of Satish's plug-ins require you to turn OFF RAM preview. If you do, you loose a major reason for having a ton of it in Vegas. Just ordinary V4 without RAM preview doesn't need a Gig of RAM to run efficiently. But, since other things can use it, and it is not all that expensive any more, why not.

So what's the best setup (hardware) to improve renders? My machine is a custom-built; running an AMD Athlon XP 2000+, 1 GB of RAM, and a 7200 RPM drive with 8 meg cache. Are there any specific BIOS settings that helps the processor crunch data faster? Or something in Windows perhaps? I always keep my disk defragged, I do it about 7 times a week. My board supports 400Mhz bus, but I've only got PC-2700 DDR in it.

The only hardware thing that can dramatically change rendering speed is processor speed/power. All other devices in your computer are able to handle the data load faster than the processor can, so the processor is the bottleneck. Anything else you change will have only a very minimal impact. Even a badly fragmented drive can still deliver and accept video data faster than the processor can crank out the frames. If improving everything in your computer allowed the processor to get all the data it needs for a frame a few milliseconds faster, that doesn't help much if it still takes the processor half a second to render the frame.

That does make sense; thanx Chienworks

I'm not a genius about these things but maybe you need to check in your BIOS and
see what you're clocking. You may not be up to speed for your processor. I know
that when I had my computer built, it didn't seem very fast(AMD Athlon XP 1800+), and
my friend that built it, looked back in the BIOS and found out that he had it clocked wrong. After he changed that, it was smokin'. He didn't over clock it, just corrected
what it was clocked at. I hope that this helps. I have never had to wait long for
rendering, although I havn't used loads of transitions and special video effects and
such. I try to keep things simple, straight cuts, easy transitions.

Dwuane