PJ,
Now THAT is a very neat trick!

Grazie,
must admit I've not used prerenders much but I can't see why it hasn't worked that way all along.
If I prerender a segment and plonk it onto the top track then Vegas doesn't render the tracks below or at least it dang well shouldn't because it's pointless.
I'm assuming you're not talking about RAM renders? If you are then yeah, that is a big improvement.

Bob.

Isn't this the PTT (Print To Tape) feature that has been with Vegas all along?

John

No, unfortunately not RAM previews. And no, not "plonking" prerendered files on the to track.

I mean the Pre-render option.

Previously I didn't, wasn't aware of getting the "notice" that nothing had to be rendered. Maybe it is JUST the "notice" I'm getting now.

However, if what is said by DJP holds for the MPEG stuff, then maybe a fully pre-rendered AVI having some minor tweaks, allows for the EXSISTING pre-rends to be maintained, then this WOULD be a bonus. It's like render to a New Track without actually seeing a track up top?

Grazie

Nooo... Not PTT.

"PJ,
Now THAT is a very neat trick!"

Yup. great for weddings and corporate jobs that have long boring static shots such as seminars or church readings and speeches and the like. In addition, u can se the maths behind the final encode and adjust to taste


"Isn't this the PTT (Print To Tape) feature that has been with Vegas all along?"

No, and to clarify the other posts, Print to tape must be at a constant 25mbps (1080i) HDV upper field first (regardless whether or not your shootign progressive) HDV will only support native 24/25p
For 720p is has to be 19mbps else it wont print to tape

The mpg2 Im refering to is is for SD delivery, but im sure the same can be done for M2ts created for BD/PS3 delivery

I havent tried encoding 1080i down to 19mbps (while retaing 1080i res) for PS3 playback, but i dont see why it wouldnt work.. Hell im sure M2t at 22mbps would aos work and allow for very mnimal loss in qualitty but aallow for additional movie duration..

something to experiment with i guess..

I almost never use pre-rendering as I find it essentially useless. If you ripple your project or make any minor changes you lose all of your renders. I usually render to a new track and then just re-render any sections that require it. If they actually fixed it so the smallest changes would not cause you to lose adjacent pre-renders it might be useful. Premiere is able to keep pre-rendered sections separate from changes in a very efficient manner. Until Vegas does it more efficiently I won't use it.

well rendering to a new track (not prerendering) is essentially doing it manually and as explained, if you do this you can alwyas split the clip that might need repairs andonly rerender that section. When working with Mpg2 you can now pretty much do the same as smartrendering will ALWYAS overide any other MPG2 render setting.
As an example, u might import an mpg at 4000kbps, but thenrender out a master at 8k.
When it hits the 4k mark, the smartrender will kick in and overide that 8k setting and simply copy the 4k across.

I jsut wish smrtrendering didnt lock up sometimes on the PS3.. for the most part it works fine, but if you leave a short black gap between clips and the smartrender begins hanfway through a Gop, then your screwed.. i dont know if tehyve fixed this in 8b, i havent tested it yet..

8a does this as prior to 8b I just did a project which contained some unaltered .m2t files captured direct from the camera and for all those type of clips it reported "no need for additional render".

I think Vegas has always worked this way, but as others have pointed out, it is not very useful.

Let me explain.

I am still running 7.0d. I just put some SD DV AVI footage on the timeline. I split it so I ended up with three events, with the center event being about 90% of the original clip. I then put a trivial (B&W) fX on this clip and then did a Shift-M (selectively prerender) to render this clip. I then rendered the whole project using the standard NTSC DV template. The entire thing "rendered" in a flash, with no video showing in the preview windows during the render. Thus, there was no new rendering, and the pre-rendered segment was used without the need for further rendering.

Thus, it works just like Grazie reports, except that it works in an older version of Vegas. I still have 6.0 installed and could repeat the experiment there, but I'm sure I'd get the same result.

However, the reason this is all but useless is that if I make any change, that pre-render is thrown out. What I did in my experiment was to simply shuffle the center event (the one I had pre-rendered) with the last event. Obviously the pre-render should still be 100% valid. Unfortunately, when I did a render, this segment was rendered again. Of course I might have had a multi-track project, and moving the video around on this track, when combined with other tracks, would almost certainly result in video different from what was rendered. However, as an engineer, my answer to that is that the pre-render should be attached to each event -- basically like a take -- and since Vegas already is smart enough to "smart render" when other tracks do not affect video that has not been altered, this "take" should not be re-rendered.

[Edit]
Alternatively, it could be assigned to a "pre-render" track and grouped with the event from which it was taken. As that event was moved around, the pre-rendered version would track with it. You could then toggle the pre-render track on/off or delete one or more of the prerendered segments from that track. Now that I think of it, that is a better way to do it.

So, as has been discussed many times before, the pre-render, which could be immensely useful, is not useful at all in most practical situations even though it would be trivial for Sony engineers to alter the program to incorporate the pre-render as a take, in which case it would work.

P.S. Just to test my theory, I searched my drives to find the pre-render file that was created when I did the pre-render I describe above. I then right-click dragged it to the original event and assigned it as a take. I then realized that the fX would act on this imported video, giving my the fX applied twice, so I had to turn off the fX. Also, for some bizarre reason, Vegas pre-renders to multiple files, even though my segment was only about ten seconds long. I had to combine these files prior to import. However, once I did this, I was able to shuffle the event and render, with the pre-rendered video no longer re-rendered.