question, wanting to speed up preview times

dogwalker wrote on 9/2/2010, 10:56 AM

I'm doing a lot on my slideshow right now. Every title is across four tracks (masking, running a sheen across the title, etc), and I've been using full-size photos (probably 6 MP and above).

Well, unless I do a temporary render to ram, preview times are just killing me, lots of pauses and hiccups.

I imagine it's a combination of those two things I listed above, so I have two questions:

First, do most of you, after you finish designing a title (and I have several), render it to a new track and/or out to a file? Is that then faster in the original project?

Second, I'm running a batch resize of all my photos, so is there a way to quickly substitute all the photos which were in directory A by those which are now in directory B? One way I'm going to try is to just rename the original folder to something like "source-original" and name the new (resized) folder to the original name of the source folder. That way, Vegas *should* just now point to the new folder, not knowing it's looking at smaller photos?

Comments

Chienworks wrote on 9/2/2010, 1:28 PM

RAM prerender is definitely the way to go. You're asking Vegas to do a LOT of work that it just can't do in realtime.

If my title is really complex i may actually create it as a separate project, render that, and use the rendered version in the overall project. You could also next the title project in the main project to maintain some separation, but then you loose the speed benefit of having a rendered version.

I've used the folder rename method in those cases many times, always with good results. Close the project so that it's not on Vegas' timeline when you do the rename so that Vegas doesn't try to automatically follow the old folder to it's new name. When you open the project ater renaming Vegas won't have a clue that it's had the media switched out right under it's nose and will happily use the new folder ... assuming that all the file names are still the same.

dogwalker wrote on 9/2/2010, 4:26 PM

Thanks, Chien. The folder rename worked like a charm.

However, I have a question on rendering the titles. I rendered it as AVI / DV and there's no transparency, so I then rendered it as AVI / uncompressed. Works great (although it's fullscreen then for some reason, but that was easy to fix), but it's huge. One title avi file is 256 MB.

Is there a better format (with alpha channel) to render?

Thanks!

Edit: ok, looks like .mov works! although it saves out as fullscreen.

Chienworks wrote on 9/2/2010, 5:23 PM

Click on the Custom button in the rendering dialog and you'll be able to change the output properties to widescreen for either uncompressed or mov.