Rob, maybe this was what I was also "seeing" on my Pre-renders? I often loop my pieces to "see" what I've got. And maybe thru' this process I am getting my QUAD primed to render.

Interesting . . Another good reason to stay with Vegas - it is making USE of the power that is being presented to us from the chip manufacturers.

Grazie

" it is making USE of the power that is being presented to us from the chip manufacturers."

Not always...
I was doign a clean convert from DV AVI SD to SD 2pass MPG2...
my cpu sat at 30%, mind you all cores were being utilised, i jsut dont think Vegas is actually set up for SSE4 properly.

Like certain codecs (Huffy as an example) its optimised for SSE2, but not 4, in turn, its not rendering as fast as it could.
I dont know why a clean transcode wouldnt use all the CPU available to to it though cnsideirng this was a2 pass render, one would think theyd change the way it "thinks" and at least double the scan before creating th efinal output, as opposed to going over the file twice.

Theoretically a 2 pass mpg encode can easily be done on a quad core at the render time it takes to do a single pass... if this is the case with SSE2.

As it stands teh only time i get full 100% core utilisation is when im rendering generated media
Aside from that, i see alot (and i mean ALOT of headroom which isnt being used

Im not complaining, but im not happy either considering the renders can at least be managed down to half of what im seeing..

This will only apply if you do the RAM renders at the same resolution as the output render. If you have your preview set for auto or half or quarter then the RAM rendering function creates frames at those sizes instead. These wouldn't be useful for the final render so they would be ignored.

Generally i do RAM renders at half size so that i can get 4 times as many frames out of my available RAM. I don't mind the loss of resolution since i'm more interested in seeing fluid movement than seeing fine details. That's fine for preview work, but Vegas wouldn't be able to use those frames in the final render.

Well, here's the way I see it. Suppose you've got some complex process going on on the timeline: compositing, blur, supersampling, etc. By doing a RAM preview (or looping the region until it plays cleanly) you've essentially done an uncompressed render into ram. Now it's a pretty simple matter for Vegas to take that region and render it into a more complex format like mpeg. Most of the work has already been done.

When you've got lots of RAM and your 20 second clip can be rendered into it, you'll see an immediate boost if you then do a final render, but a 20 minute project won't see the same benefit because it couldn'y possibly fit into RAM.

As far as Vegas making any better use of your CPU, that's not directly what's involved. It's just that it's very easy for a fast CPU to go from an essentially uncompressed ram render to some final codec, so that final render is going to be very, very fast. You paid the tax ealier when you did the RAM preview.

I wonder though if the combination of rendering to RAM and then rendering to MPEG2 (or whatever) is actually faster than just going directly to MPEG2?

Rob.