...unless you rendering machine is in your bedroom, and its fans prevent you from falling asleep after a long day of editing:)

On my list of 10,000 wishes that would be near the last.
JJK

OK here's why. Your 5 hr render is 3 hrs into it and pegging all 4 CPU's at 100% of your shiny new Quad Core and suddenly you are asked to make a change to a 3D Maya project you've been working on and that will normally take 20 minutes to render but with Vegas pegging the CPU it will take hours to render.

Rendering can't always be done over-night. There have been plenty of times I've wanted to do something while in the middle of a render and wish that I could just pause it, do something else quickly, and resume it. It's really not too much to ask.

~jr

I couldn't figure out ONE reason why you would want to pause (and possibly screw up) a render. If your machine isn't strong enough to run multiple tasks (or something of that nature)..... then don't!

> If your machine isn't strong enough to run multiple tasks (or something of that nature)..... then don't!

Sometimes the workload exceeds the available technology. ;-)

~jr

You could always go into Task Manager and assign each program one processor to use (or two depending on how many your system has).

"but with Vegas pegging the CPU it will take hours to render."

Oh, no - just set the priority of the rendering job to low and then you can edit and render at normal speed in another instance of Vegas.

"You could always go into Task Manager and assign each program one processor to use (or two depending on how many your system has)"

Yes of course - it's enough to set Vegas' affinity to say 2 cores instead of all 4... But unfortunately, you need to do it BEFORE even starting Vegas - not to mention its rendering process, so - in case you need some resources back (or just put your PC to sleep with you :)) at some time into the rendering process - halting any CPU-intensive task would really be a cool option!

Not that I'd ever deny anyone whatever they wish for but we have a simple solution.
1 PC for capture, 1 PC for editing and 1 PC for rendering.

Now what'd be nice is an automated render queue manager, must talk to Peachrock about that idea. Now that JR has given us a notepad many things could be written into there that a external app could read. With 1000BaseT very cheap and 10GigE coming down in price having a headless box or two to do the heavy lifting should be affordable.

Bob.

you can change CPU affinity/priority at any time. I do it all the time on my Quad core. I've had a render going 100% on all four cores, then need something else right away, change it to 1 core, change the other instance of vegas to the other three, do what I need & then change it back.

Works awesome, I just wish it was easier to do via windows. IE right click on a problem window/task bar button & you can change the affinity/priority.

I just tried it, and it seems you're right!

My earlier opinion comes from a previous attempt to change the affinity WHILE a render was running (don't remember which Vegas version, or whether under Xp or Vista) - anyway, it did cause Vegas to die. But it seems now it could have been a one-off case, not a rule.

it's enough to set Vegas' affinity to say 2 cores instead of all 4... But unfortunately, you need to do it BEFORE even starting Vegas

This isn't correct, but even more so, it isn't a particularly good way to solve this. The suggestion to lower the priority is the appropriate suggestion. A process with lower priority will get out of the way of the higher priority jobs.

Terje,

whether limiting affinity, or lowering priority is a better solution, depends on what exactly you need to release CPU resources for - don't you agree? There is just no hard rule here...

yes I agree. One time I was bored & the computer was rendering. So I put it on core 3 all alone & then loaded up Quake Wars & played for 30 minutes or so. Very cool. :)

I'd still LOVE a pause button because it's quicker (and a confirmation when you cancel) but I've made due with what I got. :)

My reason for being an advocate of the pause feature is thus:

I was working on a project, finished and set it to render. 6 hours into my 24 hour plus render (lots of 3d track motion) a thunder storm was rolling in. Power went out 30 minutes later I lost all of the 6 hours of render as the battery backup drained and I had to start over. If I could have paused it I could have shut down and resumed once power was restorted.

j razz

That's assuming that the pause function saves it's state on the hard drive so that it can be resumed later. That indeed is the version of pause i was so hot about ages ago. As far as simply stopping the process running for a while, i can't see that sort of pause being useful because the render would still be lost if there was a power failure.

On the other hand, if you know that the power might be interrupted you can use Windows' hibernate feature to save the current state and recover it later.

Personally i think Vegas should save the current rendering state to disk every {insert user specified time interval here} minutes, just like .veg files can be autosaved periodically. That way if there's an unplanned outage, the next time Vegas starts it can prompt you with "you have an unfinished render in progress, would you like to resume from the last point saved?" Now that would be fantastic!

There have been dozens of posts asking for this (including a few by DJPadre!).

If implemented correctly, this could be an amazingly important feature. At the heart of the request is the age-old, sage advice that large projects are best done in small increments ( how do you eat an elephant ? ... one bite at a time).

Pausing the render is dirt-simple because the rendered file is being stored on your disk as it renders (you can open Explorer and watch the file size go up). With most programs (and I think this actually used to be true of Vegas in earlier versions), when you cancel the render, the partial file remains, so you can use it in some way. Why Vegas doesn't allow this, I don't know. I can give countless examples from my own experience where I was rendering to a DV AVI file, and needed to cancel the render, but wanted to use some or all of what I already had rendered. Since Vegas smart renders DV AVI files, I could have created a new track at the top, dropped the partial DV AVI file onto that, and very quickly decided where to cut between that and the other tracks. I could then start a new render, and everything that had painstakingly already been rendered would be seamlessly added to my new render, without any time required other than a few minutes of file copying.

Since Vegas 8 now has smart render for MPEG-2, this same capability now exists for that format as well. Even if Sony didn't implement a pause function, simply not deleting the partial encode, or giving the user an alert box asking "Delete partial encode?" would make tremendous good sense, and would take, literally, less than one minute to implement (one dialog box), and zero time to test.

I just did a quick test with VirtualDub: It does NOT delete the partial encodes. I just did another test with TMPGEnc. It does NOT delete the partial encodes. I don't have Pinnacle on this computer, but my memory is that it doesn't either. Sony seems to be quite alone in doing this.

John,

You are correct, previous Vegas versions kept the partials. I've needed that feature more than once since it was disabled.

JAB

whether limiting affinity, or lowering priority is a better solution, depends on what exactly you need to release CPU resources for

Not really, for two reasons. The first is that the user wanted to ability to pause a render. Lowering the priority has exactly that effect. With one added benefit. When his computer is not doing anything else, the computer will automatically "un-pause" the render and pause it again once something more important happens. So, to mimic Pause, priority is the way to go.

The other thing is that your computer probably is better at time-slicing than you are. If he needs the render to go at 25% (assuming quad core) then it is a good solution, but if he wants to run stuff with a higher priority at best possible speed, no, affinity is not it.

CPU affinity was mainly created to keep some software, notably some software that might have problems being moved from a CPU to another, from crashing. I don't think this problem really exists anymore, but it did way back when in Windows NT days.

Now, thirdly, there is another important reason not to dabble with affinity in this case. Let's assume he starts a long render, wants to do some 3D work, lowers Vegas priority and starts working. Then the phone rings and he talks to hsi girlfriend for half an hour. If his 3D software didn't actually render in that period, the Vegas render would run at about 100% CPU and he would be a lot closer to finished. If he had set it to a single core affinity it would have been running at 25% and nowhere near as far in the rendering process.

In other words, let the computer do what the computer does best, running tasks and scheduling them according to your priorities. Don't muck about with affinity, it was created for a whole other purpose.

Pausing the render is dirt-simple because the rendered file is being stored on your disk as it renders

Not dirt simple, but straightforward enough. The main problem would be how to find where in a project rendering was stopped when Vegas died (assuming it is automatic). This isn't impossible to record, but neither is it "dirt simple". A separate file containing the rendering position on the timeline paired with a file position in the rendered file would work. Then at least it should be possible to go back to the time the supporting file was updated and render from there.

The main problem would be the fact that some renders use previously rendered frames etc and so forth, but that could be fixed by allowing only render re-start on full frames (i-frames I guess).

Finally, and this is probably the main issue, Vegas doesn't render video. It uses third party applications to do so, Sony would need support in these do enable this. I am not sure they have such support.

"I can give countless examples from my own experience where I was rendering to a DV AVI file, and needed to cancel the render, but wanted to use some or all of what I already had rendered."

I believe if you kill Vegas through task manager instead of hitting the cancel button, you will get your partial file. I've had LOTS of experience with this and Vegas crashing while rendering! :)

I believe if you kill Vegas through task manager instead of hitting the cancel button, you will get your partial file. I've had LOTS of experience with this and Vegas crashing while rendering! :) That's a good idea. Thanks!