PrintToTape: which is the fastest: rendering first or letting PTT do it?

FuTz wrote on 2/19/2004, 10:13 AM
When printing to tape, the program will prerender the project before actually printing.
It came to my mind that rendering first would give me a copy in AVI of what I want to print.
Now, rendering this 52 min project will take a century: 36 seconds rendered so far with 6 hours and 40 mins to go (and it's going up!)

Would it be quicker to let PTT prerender my project and print or will it take the same time ?
I need to gain time now so I can render an AVI tomorrow... what I must do nOw is Print these two tapes and deliver!
Thanks...

Comments

Jsnkc wrote on 2/19/2004, 10:18 AM
With PTT it only renders the sections of the video it needs to render, with rendering to AVI it has to render everything on the timeline. Seems to me that doing a PTT would be faster, unless you have effects on your entire video like color correction or things like that, becasue then Vegas will have to render the entire project anyways.
FuTz wrote on 2/19/2004, 10:23 AM

You sure are right! It said I have to prerender 80% of project.
It's all standard clips with absolutely no effect except for a timecode burning (one more track under the form af a Generated Media pulled down to 100% transparent and Timecode FX applied...)

The question now:I have to go for a while, will it wait for me after prerender to start my cam before printing? Haven't been printing in a long time, obviously...
Former user wrote on 2/19/2004, 10:24 AM
One advantage to rendering to file is you don't have to leave your camera on all night. But otherwise, I don't think you will find much speed difference. In fact, print to file might be slower because it has to copy the whole timeline, not just render effects.

Dave T2
Former user wrote on 2/19/2004, 10:28 AM
The timecode is an effect so it has to re-render the whole program. Go to a movie or something.

Dave T2
FuTz wrote on 2/19/2004, 10:33 AM
Holy, I have time to grow some corn so I can bring my own popcorn from what I see, lol !

Thanks for input!
jetdv wrote on 2/19/2004, 10:58 AM
It's the "timecode burning" that is causing your problem. You ARE affecting every frame of the clip - hence the over 80% warning. Take off the timecode burn and it would be MUCH faster on PTT than a full render. In your case, both times should be about the same.
coffeebean wrote on 2/19/2004, 1:59 PM
i have migrated to vegas from final cut pro and wow. the only issue is the render issue. I print to tape and it takes X hours and then mpeg 2 and another X hours...an i doing something wrong...Patrick
Jsnkc wrote on 2/19/2004, 2:10 PM
Nope, you're not doing anything wrong, that is the one thing that a lot of people think isn't the greatest about Vegas. But I'm sure the people at Sony/SoFo have been hearing our complaints and will hopefully do something about it in the upcomming release of the new version.
FuTz wrote on 2/19/2004, 2:27 PM

... jet: unfortunately I have to burn this timecode because it serves a double purpose: protect these images and it's ganna be used as a reference; these are shots I want to sell to a director for a film...
Thanks everybody; 6h53 to go now ! hahaha!
BE0RN wrote on 2/19/2004, 2:39 PM
I know this is common knowledge to most, and I don't take credit for it, as I learned it on this forum, but if you are new, you will benefit from it.

Make sure you are rendering to a seperate hard disk than the one that you captured to. In other words, you shouldn't render to the same disk that holds the *.avi files in your project. When I realized that was a problem, and started rendering to a seperate, almost empty hard drive, my rendering time decreased by probably 30%.

Make sure you are only running Vegas at the time of the render. Any icons in your system tray mean a program is running, and you should close all that you can. I don't think the Volume Control icon does anything, but antivirus software, if enabled while trying to render, can really slow down your render time.

These two things alone can create a noticable difference in render times.

Again, that's all information I learned from reading this forum.

Beorn
DGrob wrote on 2/19/2004, 6:22 PM
BE0RN: I didn't know that. Are your seperate drives daisy-chained firewire by any chance? I'm running a workstation replacement laptop with 2 external drives daisy-chained via PCI adaptor. DGrob
farss wrote on 2/19/2004, 11:14 PM
Sorry for the late reply, been at work all day.

1) For a big project ALWAYS render to a new file an dthen PTT from that. Letting the PTT phase do the render has two problems, they're only prerender files and Vegas has a bad habit of loosing them. Once that happens you've got to do it all over again. Secondly you may notice some minor thing that needs fixing, with a little luck you can fix it in the new AVI file which means you don't have to rerender the whole thing again.

2) Rendering from one drive to another will be faster even if they are two firewire (shudder) drives. Doing this saves the heads having to move i.e. whole things runs faster. Just how much depends on how much is actual rendering and how much is just copying frames. If it's mostly the later then things will go a lot faster.
craftech wrote on 2/20/2004, 5:10 AM
I stopped using the Prerender/PTT method with version 3.0. Many times the bugs in Vegas don't seem to show up in a full render. I don't believe begging to plunk down a few hundred dollars for a new version which many seem to be anxious to do is likely to change that.
The difference in time is not that significant. Basically, it takes a long time either way. I render to a different drive myself, but it is for space considerations more than anything else because I keep my programs on a 40GB drive and use two 120GB drives to store clips, renders, etc.

John
FuTz wrote on 2/20/2004, 5:59 AM
Well, thanks guys. I've done rendering yesterday by midnight.

The one thing to fix now is this one:
I freshly intalled Win2K on my desktop with sp4 around 2 weeks ago.
Result: when I start my cam, the computer freezes. Never had this problem before. Result: I can't capture or PTT on this computer. In fact, I can't do *anything* if I start the cam plugged in 1394...

My laptop's got lots of work since last 3-4 days...

Of course, this hell is also tedious because of numerous "codes 18" too (ie: the problem is *18 inches* behind the keyboard)...