Some of the things that will most impact your render times are things like generating "effects" (titles, cross-fades, other effects) or trans-coding from AVI to MPEG-2. Also, the bit-rate you've chosen in MPEG-2 will have an effect. What features you have or don't have in Movie Studio shouldn't have much of an effect.

Those are the software things that will most affect your render time. But hardware may affect it more. Folks here on the forum can tell you if your render time is off the mark if you can provide the specs on your PC (memory, CPU speed) and the specs on the format you converted from and the format you converted to.

Thanks gogiants for your response. I have a Hewlett Packard 763n computer that has a Pentium 4 CPU AT 2.53ghz with 512RAM and an 80 gig hard drive. I did add some titles and music as well as voice narration to the video. I'm not sure about the transcoding or the bitrate. Didn't fool with either one of those items. I guess I will redo the movie and concentrate on the formats just to see what happens. Appreciate your response.

I have an HP Pavillion 2.53 Ghz Pentium iV. It would take it less than an hour to rendor a 36 minute video. I am not sure why yous it taken that long. How full is your disk drive and have you defraged it lately?

Ole

Based on what you've described, your PC should be plenty powerful enough.

One guess is that the culprit is the file format you captured your VHS tape to. If it is anything other than .avi, then chances are the render into AVI could be quite slow.

FYI

This past weekend, I captured a 20 minute wedding video from VHS through my JVC Mini-DV camcorder to my computer ( P3 - 650 MHz with 256 meg RAM running Windows 98 SE and a dedicated 60 GByte drive for video ). The capture was to DV AVI. It took almost 7 hours to render to mpeg2. I don't do anything special with my computer when using it (e.g. Norton Anti-virus 2004 and Pop-Up Stopper were still running).

Al

That fits pretty well with my experience - 20 min of avi to MPEG2 would take about 5 hours on my 933MHz PIII and a little over 20 min on my 3.2GHz P4.

avi to avi would be a lot quicker, but I never tried MPEG to MPEG.

Ian G.

Thanks to all the responses I've received. Between reading the manuals, trying the hit and miss method, and seeking help in this forum I am quickly learning. I deleted the 39 minute movie and started all over. Once again, I captured it from my VCR into my JVC mini-camcorder and then into the Movie Studio program on my computer. I then defraged my hard drive. Returning to Movie Studio I setup the video for recording eliminating the music, narrative comments and transitions that I had originally place into the movie. RENDERING TIME WENT FROM THE ORIGINAL 15 HOURS TO 1 HOUR AND 2 MINUTES. I will continue experimenting but had to share this with the forum. I'm not sure if defragging solve the problem or if eliminating some of the features I had originally added to the video shortened the render time. Next step using the same movie is to defrag then go back to the video and add titles, transitions, music as I had originally done just to see how much longer it takes to render the movie.

you should not have to defrag more than once a week or so, unless you are adding and removing lots of files all the time. i would try doing the editing you mentioned, and then the render and see how long it takes. you should have a defregged disk now, so don't worry until you have long rendering times.

As mentioned in another post (or maybe here too) the cost of hard drives is so cheap(160gb, 7200rpm for 70-80 at bestbuy, the easiest thing is to add a 2nd hdd and use that only for video/audio editing.....

ron