All I want to do is save it as an mpeg---I don't think I have any filters set up. My computer has an athlon xp 1.4 ghz machine with 784 megs of RAM. I tried to let the movie render yesterday--it was still doing it last night when I went to bed, when I got up this AM, it was only 40% done and it now saysthat it has 23 hours to go---I gotta have something set wrong.

What should I look for in the way of filters?

Thanks for the help.

fleeper

I find rendering times decrease with the use of a codec when aquiring your source avi. If I render an AVI that has been created without a codec like (Huffyuv or DV), then rendering takes on average twice as long.

Sorry about the 'filters' Fleeper. I have been working in Adobe Photoshop and they use the term 'filters' for doing the same thing as 'Video FX' in Screenblast.

Video FX is where you may be using a 'Cookie Cutter' or 'Gaussian Blur' or 'Film Effects' or any of the other many effects offered. Any of these or adding Transitions can definitely affect the length of time it takes to render a video clip.

Just curious, how long is your video that you are trying to render? It sounds like your PC is much faster than mine. My source files are .avi files created from my DC10plus analog capture card. When I render, I am using the MainConcept MPEG-2 Format and the DVD NTSC format.

Al

Fast computer = three to five times the length of the video to render, depending on FX, transitions, color correction etc.
Fast = 3.2 P4, 1 gig Ram

The video is 1 hour long...and very little in the way of transitions.

fleeper

Many things determine render time
porcessor speed, ram, video card
Adding more ram will help

But before you go buy a new computer try this:
Edit in screenblast as you normally would, then render and burn with the computer set to minimal settings

In Windows XP, create a new user, I made one called Render & Burn
log on as the new user
Go into Display properties of you video card
Turn off wall paper and screensavers
reduce color quality, this will not affect final video quality, just what you see on the monitor
Go into startup on the start button and delete everything
Go into msconfig - startup - and turn off anything you don't need.
Run "Adware" (find free download) to search and destroy spyware and adware

Now turn off the computer for a least one minute
This is called a cold boot, (warm boot means to restart) while the computer is off, ram is cleared. Certain programs will use ram and not release it, so when you turn the computer off, ram is clear of all resident ram using software

Turn on the computer, open Screenblast, render as .avi
Burn as .mpeg2

Another thing that will help is a second hard drive with 8 megs of ram on the drive spinning at 7200rpm
Use one drive for the Screenblast program and the second drive for video storage and rendering temp space

Just a quick update.

The wedding video I mentioned earlier finally finished rendering this past weekend and took 44 hours to complete. The video is 20 years old and nearly every scene had to be color corrected (obviously our camera guy did not know anything about white balance). The entire video turned out to be around 1.5 hours in length.

I really need to get a faster computer!!!!

Al

My first DVD-effort, that is about 25 minutes of images/sound/text took about 30 hours to render on my old trusty P3 600 MHz with 256 MB RAM on Windows XP. (Yes it's old & slow)

And the intro (nearly 15 seconds) took about 45 minutes! AAAAARGHHH.

And the strang thing is that whil editing, the thumbnail preview happily continued at about realtime speed. Frustrating.

I have a new toshiba 3.2Ghz with HT and my 1hour and 20 minute video with no effects whatsoever says it's going to take 23 hours, that's is absolutely crazy. I've burned DVDs off of windows media center with Sonic and it takes about 30 minutes for an hour show. And I can burn hour long DVDs with intervideo DVD and it takes about 30 minutes also... anyone got any ideas?

Something is wrong. I have a 3.2 with HT and 1 gig of Ram. Twenty minutes of video renders in about 1 1/2 hours. Give us more detail. What steps are you taking?

Ok, I'll start from the beginning. I use our canon camera from church which is the canon GL2. I think, about a $2000-3000 camera. I record the video straight off the camera using no tape with windows movie maker. I saved the video at the highest settings, about a 1.08G file. 1 hour 20 minutes. Then I import the file into Screenblast Movie Studio. Crop the beginning and the end of the movie a little and click make movie. My burner is a 4x but I'm not to the burning stage yet. I'm not using any effects at all. What else am I missing that I should tell ya? Thanks for listening!

You must be recording in some highly compressed format like MPEG. If you had been recording in DV .avi format then an 80 minute file would be 18GB, not around 1GB. It will always take much longer using a highly compressed file as the source.

Does your computer have a firewire port? If so, you should be connecting the camera to the computer via firewire and capturing in DV format. This will allow you to edit and render much faster. The quality of the finished video should be better too.

Ok, thank you, so, I have firewire, and that is how I was importing.... but I was importing to Windows Movie Maker 2. That's prolly my problem.. anyways... what do i need to adjust in Screenblast Movie Studio so I'm capturing at the best quality and also for the fastest rendering???

Which "highest quality" setting are you using? That may be part of the problem. If you must use Windows Movie Maker, use the DV-AVI setting and make sur you use the correct frame size, etc. If your using a Windows Media format at highest quality, it takes FOREVER to encode a WMV file to MPEG2.

Why not capture the tapes with Screenblast? They will already be in the correct DV format (as long as you chose DVD as your intended output). Then After you edit, render as a DVD compatible file. This hsould speed things up significantly.

I capture all my tapes to DV format in Screenblast (formerly, now I'm using Vegas 4). I don't apply any filters (I haven't done that yet, anyway), and just maybe 5 or 6 transitions throughout the clip. My clips are usually between 15 minutes and 30 minutes long. It takes me about 45 minutes to render 30 minute clips to a DVD compliant MPEG2 file.

Luckily, I have a Canopus ADVC1394 card, that converts the VCR signal to DV on the fly, and allows color/brightness/etc adjustment directly to the capture, so that saves a huge amount of rendering time for me.

One last note, if you have enough spare hard drive space, you can capture to DV format, make your edits, and render back to DV format. This should create your video at a faster rate, and you won't lose any quality. Then you can take that final DV format file and render it as an MPEG2, which should convert quicker since there are no transitions or effects to worry about, they would already be part of the video file that's being converted and won't need to be rendered again. While this involves an extra step, it may wind up saving more time.

You may want to do a few test runs with a 10 minute or so clip to see the time differences. Good luck.

Wow, thanks so much, I don't NEED to capture with Windows Movie Maker 2. And I won't anymore. But I did because that was the only program I had at the time. I didn't use a tape. Oops! So all I have is the original WMV format :( Now I will use Screenblast Movie Studio. I have an 80GB drive with about 50GB available. Should I be worried about space when recording in DV format?

>Should I be worried about space when recording in DV format?

I wouldn't worry, but it's something you need to be aware of. On the plus side, the cost of HD space is coming down all the time and you end up with the best results.

Ian G.

I bought a Western Digital 200 GB drive, 7200 rpm, 8 meg ram, and installed it as a second drive. I use this for video storage and have Screenblast/Vegas on this first drive. I also use the second drive for temp renderering space.

That way the program is accessing one drive and storing data on the other.

Well, I have the Toshiba P25-S670 Laptop, And the second hard drive would go where the battery does. The original hard drive is an 80GB, 5400RPM, Buffer size: 8192KB. If I were to get a second it would be identical, for $399. I also have a 80GB External firewire drive... but I think that would take forever compared to the primary drive.

An external firewire drive should be plenty fast enough for video storage and editing.

I'll also make a comment on the suggestion to render to DV first then render that subsequent file to MPEG. Yes, this subsequent render will be faster than rendering to MPEG to begin with. However, you must take the time to do the first render as well. The total time for both renders combined will probably take longer than doing it in one step.

So it sounds like my best bet is to capture in??? MPEG2? I haven't had a chance to practice or see the settings for capture with Screenblast Movie Studio 'cause it's still rendering!!!! only 8 hours left!!! I guess I just want to know what is the best total steps to take from capture to dvd... time is important 'cause I capture at least 3 times a week for 1 hour videos and have to burn them to DVD in that week also. And I need the computer to do other things. So I can't have it rendering 3 days a week for three 1 hour videos. Maximun quality is not a issue but I would like to get the best for the amout of time I have.... I guess I just expect a lot with $6000 worth of camera and computer/sofware

No, the best thing to do is to capture in DV .avi format. This is how MovieStudio's capture program will get the file when you connect the camera via firewire.

UPDATE: After capturing with Screenblast Movie Studio it only took me 30 minutes to render a 1 hour and 10 minute movie. Thanks for the help!!!!