"2 min to render 1 min of video"

That's actually pretty good, you must not have a lot of filters or transitions in your project. I've rendered 2 hour videos before and it took me around 18 hours on a similar system to yours..

If you want faster, then at the moment Vegas probably isn't for you. Hopefully in the next upgrade we will see some new things though.

Without knowing your project in detail it's impossible to comment on the speed you're getting. This can vary enormously depending on what you are trying to render. I've got an 866MHz P3. If i dump a DV file on the timeline and render it to DV i'll often get about 3x real time speed, or 20 seconds to render 1 minute of video. At the other extreme, i had a 5 second scene with a crossfade to a clip with several Film FX's applied, color curves, and a title superimposed. This section took close to an hour to render. So the range i've seen goes from 1/3x to maybe 600x real time depending on effects and such. If you are rendering to a different format like MPEG it can take even longer.

I rendered a 1 hour video with a hollywood square effect. two quadrants were video of a scene shot from two different angles and two of the other qudrants were picture slideshows. I also color corrected the video. The entire render process took 52 hours on a 1.2 GHZ athlon! I grew a little impatient but the final product was worth it!

Tekhead

Anyway you cut it--you don't edit in Vegas if fast renders are important--You render in Vegas if a wonderful workflow and a fantastic final project is what you are looking for---Render while you sleep or seriously consider a hardware based answer.

True that, but in looking at the render times you guys are talking about....Geez!
Even with heavy layer composites filled with motion blur and Supersampling, the longest time I've had was 17 hours for a 2 hour project. Something just ain't right with some of the systems....Vegas doesn't use hardware, but it's only generated and edited media that requires rendering. Even with a 3D bug in a lower third during an entire hour long show, I've never seen these sorts of times. And that's on an IDE system, not SCSI....Just for giggles I this moment, did a 4 square/brady bunch thing with 3 layers of generated media, plus conversion to PAL. 10 sec's of video took less than 2 minutes to render on my 2.6 laptop, going to a firewire drive. 7 layers, blur, convert PAL to NTSC, slight color correction....Vegas ain't the fastest renderer by any stretch, but it's also not as slow as some seem to be reporting.

Ah must be that "If SPOT then RenderTIME=RenderTIME/2" logic that the SOFO (opps I mean Sony) guys put in.

Gotta get me some of dat :)

I was using Replaytv mpeg file for a source and renderering to mpeg2 for those that where wondering. Thanks for the info everyone