Thanks Grazie.
You should get into counselling.
I've settled down a bit.
Meds help.
I don't hate Vegas.
I want to understand it.
Anyway,---project has cookie-cutter effect for entire length.
A dramatic fuzzy effect.
Like we used to do with vaseline on lenses,---way back.
Could that have slowed down render time?
Apart from that,---some velocity reduction, not much,---bit of colour correction.
That's about it.

The fuzzy effect the length of the track is killing you. Check some of the other threads on length of render even with balls to the wall speed with HDV takes whole day with "hyperfast stuff" in the machine. Do you have V6?

JJK

Yes

Any compositing or adding of effects that are the entire length of the project will require rendering of every frame. It's a function primarily of cpu speed. To say that another NLE solution would be faster may be misleading. I am not an expert (a few here truly are, though, and hopefully will pitch in) but a solution that requires a special hardware board to decrease render times may be no better than Vegas' native Network Rendering.

That is a comparison I would like to see - all things being as equal as can be, how do these solutions compare - Vegas and single cpu vs. dual cpu vs. network render, and Premiere or whatever and their hardware dependency.

From the list of effects etc, I would expect a very long render. You are actually doing things that are often done by multiple applications in the production environment of the yesteryears. That meant a days render in one and then another render in another.

It sounds like a 2.6 to 3.0 GHZ P4 is what you must be using. There is nothing wrong with that. I have had 45 minute projects take as long as yours did when there was a lot of track motion invovled. Believe it or not, that isn't that bad. Remember that you are rendering animation at that point.

Here is what folks who are making a living do. Either I run the render on a machine that just sits and crunches all day while I work on another, or I just let it render along while I edit another project. Remember that you can run Vegas multiple time on the desktop. It is not uncommon for me to be rendering something in the background while editing, or right now why I am on the net.

Actually I am rendering/encoding right now and uploading file to the net right now while typing this message. I am on a 2.6 ghz P4.

The key is plan your delivery time with render in mind if you add a bunch of effects and particularly compositing and track motion. Then learn to do other work, like another edit while the render is going on.
KK

Hiyah!

"cookie-cutter effect" - Perhaps do this as an "after" render?

"A dramatic fuzzy effect." Whole length?

" . . some velocity reduction, " is that in part or the whole length?

"bit of colour correction." . . well I do this for a section then bring it BACK into project

Ok, I'd get into the habit of rendering out those bits I want; OR break up project into mini-veggies; OR make nested projects and farm them off for side rendering.

Tell you the truth I can't wait to see how something works. I'm often rendering out something just to check it out - HAH! I'm tooooo impatient! I'm a Serial Vegist !

About the comparative renders for FCP or whatever .. . listen to the keyboards clacking away now! Can you hear them? That'll be VegHeads getting their thoughts together . . . .

Grazie

Hmmm... been thinking ..

Look, this is all about frustrating the Creative Spirit and waiting for a render. Well, don't do it. Render stuff as you get to it. That is what I do. I want to make Edit Decisions based on the way I see something.

Grazie

If you are using Gaussian Blur or similar fX, that is a really slow fX. If you don't need the fX for the entire length of the project, then apply it only the events where you need it, rather than to the entire track.

It would be interesting to see a comparison of the time it takes to render a sample piece of video with each fX. It would be a simple, although tedious test: Apply the first fX, render, and then record the time. Remove that fX, apply the second fX in the list, render, and record the time. While the absolute numbers would of course depend on the computer, I think the relative results would apply, almost exactly, to any computer. For example, I would expect that Gaussian Blur would render at 3-5x the amount of time of some of the simpler fX. If Sony did such a test, they could even incorporate a "speed" logo in the fX that would inform the user as to which fX is a speed demon and which is a speed hog. We could then make trade-offs between creativity and delivery schedules. The way it is now, such trade-offs must be made in absence of any hard information.

JM! "would inform the user as to which fX is a speed demon and which is a speed hog."

A most excellent idea! - DO IT John!

G

Just rendered another smaller project with little in the way of FX save for some velocity changes and blur. About 10 minutes long,----machine crunched it up nicely in a reasonable amount of time.
SO,---must have been that fuzzy frame effect that slowed down the munching.
Sounds cheezy to use this for an entire hour,---but it was done tastefully and suited the project.
I will however NEVER do that again.
"After" effect?
That mean rendering proejct to .avi then adding and rendering the fuzzy frame effect by itself.
This would be faster?

Another question?
Working on 30 second TV commercial.
18 tracks.
Video seems to be lagging behind VO by several seconds.
Need to fit narration to video,---stills in this case.
Why the lag?
Hw can we overcome it.

What's your preview window quality set to? If you have a lot of stuff going on (sounds liek you do) then sound may lag behind video while previewing at Good or Best. Adjust preview quality to Draft or Preview and let us know if it get's better.

Also... I notice you have filled in your system details in your profile... but your processor is "Intel Pentium 4". Can you update that to specify the speed of your CPU. Thanks!

The requested stats are there now.
Pent (R) 4 CPU
3.01 GHZ
1.GB RAM
Thanks for tip on preview window Liam.
That's much better.

Hi,

To me Vegas is all.
but.....

If you want to make your living from V. and edit a 1.5, 2 hrs project i think you should invest a bit more. :-)

Most of my projects are that long and :

Custom build modular PC:

4x3.0Ghz Pentium
4x2GB RAM
8x120GB HD 10.000RPM
and of course....a lot of colling fans :-)

Do you wanna know my rendering time? :-)

4hrs on a 3hrs project with a lot of special effects and other visual stuff........

Later,

Bertie,

JM: "would inform the user as to which fX is a speed demon and which is a speed hog."

OK, I'm doing it right now. I'll post it as its own thread later today. Pretty interesting and useful results. Here's are some preliminary results, which I have not yet audited:

Plug in				Seconds		"x" times slower than fastest

Sony (Legacy) Broadcast Colors	13.9 		1.1

Sony Add Noise	 		64.8 		5.1

Sony Black and White		16.2 		1.3

Sony Black Restore		12.7 		1.0

Sony Border			19.7 		1.5

Sony Brightness and Contrast	15.0 		1.2

Sony Broadcast Colors	 	18.5 		1.5

Sony Bump Map	 		99.5 		7.8

Sony Channel Blend	 	18.5 		1.5

Sony Chroma Blur	 		50.9 		4.0

Sony Chroma Keyer	 		59.0 		4.6

Sony Color Balance	 	19.7 		1.5

Sony Color Corrector	 	22.0 		1.7

Sony Color Corrector (Secondary)	23.1 		1.8

Sony Color Curves	 		19.7 		1.5

Sony Convolution Kernel	 	79.9 		6.3

Sony Cookie Cutter	 	19.7 		1.5

Sony Deform	 		302.1 		23.7

Sony Film Effects	 		358.8 		28.2

Sony Film Grain	 		42.8 		3.4

Sony Gaussian Blur	 	88.0 		6.9

Sony Glow	 		110.0 		8.6

Sony Gradient Map	 		26.6 		2.1

Sony HSL Adjust	 		42.8 		3.4

Sony Invert	 		17.4 		1.4

Sony Lens Flare	 		74.1 		5.8

These are based on rendering a 10 second clip on a 2.8 GHz single-thread, single CPU P4, using Vegas 5.0d. The actual times are not that important (because that will depend on your CPU), but the relative times ARE important. This should give you a good idea of which fX are going to slow down your renders the most, and which have little impact. I'll post the full results when the remaining renders are done (some of these suckers take forever, even for a 10 second clip).

4x3.0Ghz Pentium

Bertie

Are you saying you have a Quad 3GHz processor? Wow.

Great results... shame the formatting doesn't stick...

Just one other idea... some pretty common thing that adds considerably to render time (and is possibly quite frequently used) is to have a track motion PIP effect and to have a feathered drop-shadow applied to the track. I've found that doing this (just adding the drop-shadow) racks up the render times considerably.

Curious to see this sort of effect compared to other standard FX's in your test.

Liam,

The formatting is corrected now -- it takes a few iterations to get it right, and you read it while I was in the middle of correcting it. As for my CPU, no, it is an old 2.8 GHz Pentium 4 single CPU, about 2.5 years old.

Sorry John... the question about the Quad processor was for Bertie28 ... I'll edit my post to make that clear (in the threaded view it would be clear who I responded to).

Try a credit roll with a 4k jpg background with some track 3d pans/crops. Your machine will cry uncle.

JJK

Sorry.
My background is telling an editor what to do over his shoulder.
Mostly Avid with rack-mounted stuff and power out the ying yang I suppose.
Trying to learn technical stuff.
Where would you spend first to improve rendering performance.
Also are there ways I can tune the current machine to work more efficiently?

1- Particular things in Vegas can take a long time.
Median filter (using Mike Crash's Smart Smoother instead)
3d compositing with large images
I find chroma blur really slow
bezier masking tool with multiple points and feathering
Multiple unsharp masks or gaussian blurs

The draft mode is significantly faster than other preview modes, if you need that.

2- Making sure your machine runs fast:
A- Do a spot check to see if you can optimize it a little more. Run DSE's original rendertest.veg
When you export, you need to set quality to BEST.
http://www.vasst.com/resource.aspx?id=35443070-0b67-4a2e-807c-a7f431ebd02d

Compare results against below (this is my compilation of rendertest.veg results):

Unfortunately there are no Vegas benchmarks for dual processor and multi-core systems. Spot may have results for dual core dual Opteron, although they may not be particularly useful.

3- Probably the best thing you can do is avoid things that require really long render times.

4- Other ways to speed performance:
A- Use multiple instances of Vegas. Render in one, work in the other.
B- Network rendering. There are a bunch of catches to this.

My machine did test render is 1:48.
Thanks Glenn.
That good?