PTT / Render Time Question

ArmyVideo wrote on 12/15/2003, 6:40 PM

I've been using V4 for about 6 months now, but mostly for 30 second spots and motion still montages. I'm currently printing to tape a 26 minute piece consisting of about 3 minutes of motion stills at the head and tail, and 23 minutes of color corrected / letterboxed DV footage in the middle 4 Vid tracks total. It's on hour 2.5, and says it has nearly 7.5 hours to go. I'm runnin a 1.9 P4 w/ 512 of ram, most all of it is set to be used by V4 during renders. Is this the type of render time I should expect? If I doubled (or better) my ram, how much would this help?
Don't get me wrong, I love V4, and am not so much complaining as I am curious for future planning.

Thanks in Advance!
AV

Comments

beerandchips wrote on 12/15/2003, 6:48 PM

I too hate the render times. Especially if I missed something studpid like forgetting to fade up on one graphic or whatever and have to re-render. But, I do have to say the the finished product always looks great. I would rather wait then the programmers make it faster and lose quality.

randy-stewart wrote on 12/15/2003, 9:40 PM

ArmyVideo,
My experience has been that you can't really count on what the time remaining says unless your show is pretty static (few changes). I think it computes the time based upon what it's doing at the time. For instance, my Christmas video is 17 minutes long. The front part is a lot of stills with cuts in between on a music bed. It zoomed through those pretty quick and predicted about a 3 hour render time (I'm running on a PIII 866Mhz, 512 ram). But at the end I have embedded PIPs against a panoramic background with fades on a music bed which slowed it way down. The final render took about 4 1/2 hours. When rendering, I usually start it and check progress every hour or so or just go to bed and check it in the morning. I agree with beerandchips that it is worth the wait. Vegas quality rocks!
Randy

ArmyVideo wrote on 12/16/2003, 3:08 AM

Well, the render took exactly 7 hours as predicted via the time remaining indicator. However, I must agree the quality of the finished product iss well worth the wait! If I had the cash, a multi-stream real time machine like the Media 100 844/x would be sitting in my rack... but for the price, how can I complain? I will definitly be investing in more ram, but will continue to sing the praises of V4 to all who will listen..

Happy Holidays to all, and to all a good night..er.. morning!
AV

busterkeaton wrote on 12/16/2003, 8:55 AM

ArmyVideo,

One way you may be able to speed up the workflow is do work with multiple copies of Vegas. If one segment of your project is panning and zooming a group of stills, when you are done with that you can start rendering it to avi. Then you can open a second copy of Vegas and start color correcting the other part of the project. Then when you are done bring the avi of stills back into Vegas and render you project. Since it is already avi, your final rendering will go quicker. I believe this will only work when your final render is to AVI, otherwise, it would still have to transcode.