I agree that rendering times are ridiculously long. I placed nine AVI's on the time line end to end, no transitions, and clicked on burn CD, to make a video CD. This was just before midnight last night. It's still rendering at 8:23 AM, now 52% complete. Glad I'm not in a hurry....zzzzzzzzzzzz

Rendering speed is relative to your processor speed. Dual 450's P3? That's a snail by today's standards. The fact is most people bellyaching about rendering speed have outmoded hardware. I built a 1200 Mhz AMD early this year. That is already considered a "slow" machine considering what in now available.

Well, what a cold shower this morning, just when I was about to order vv3. If I get a dual amds system with 512+ megs, how long will it take to render hour with reasonable effects. (I know that the latter is a somewhat esoteric concept).

Did you see in my post that Speed Razor rendered the same thing in 16 minutes?

Everything was done in VV3

Reminds me of my old power pc/radius/premiere kit took hours to render seconds! (ten years ago!)

I haven't done any quality testing myself, but others have indicated that you can render at preview quality with no discernable difference from the higher settings. Rendering to preview quality is vastly faster. If I remember correctly, the test done was to grab scenes from two clips, one rendered preview and one rendered good or best, and multiply(?) them in photoshop. There was no difference, though I'm sure that could vary with footage, fx and filters.

Strange, I rendered an 18 minute piece with color correction in VV3 and it took less than 4 hours. All the video had been captured in Pinnacle. My machine is a single P3 450 with 128 RAM. Hmmm. I expect long times with my machine, but your times seem screwy.

K

I tested this on my machine with one 4 min. clip captured with VV3. I used color correction for entire clip. I used print to tape from time line and it took just over 1 hour and 20 min to render and print to tape . I have a home made pc Duron 850 mhz with 256 ram.

Confirmed. I just tried a 4 minute clip and Premiere does it in under 10 minutes. I'm not going to wait out VV3 - it 's over 20 minutes and still climbing. And says it's doing render '2 of 28' even though it's a single VV3-captured DV clip on the timeline. And Premiere uses some 85% of my dual procs but VV won't.

Forcing the MSDV codec doesn't change anything.

We need some very quick clarification on this from SF or we're talking an awful lot of returns (or a class action lawsuit).

1) "...Speed Razor rendered the same thing in 16 minutes"

Slight correction: Speed Razor rendered a project that was on the surface somewhat similar, using a different codec, in 16 minutes.

2) "we're talking ...a class action lawsuit"

Vegas was designed to provide quality output first and foremost. Nobody at SF will disagree with you: render speed IS extremely important, but at some point in the not too distant future we won't even be having this discussion, since the procs will just grind through these renders in hardly an time at all.

SF could have released a product that produced lame output quality very quickly, but plenty of apps already to that. The process of getting DV off the timeline and back to tape has improved significantly between Vegas 2 and 3, and rendering will continue to be optimized.

additional notes:

Premiere doesn't field render crossfades (no different fields in crossfades) so there could be a speed boost because of that.

It may indeed be that in certain scenarios Premiere handles Dual procs better. Worth investigating.

Vegas has a ton of settings that can result in an increase (or decrease), in render times. It may take some experimenting on your part to find an acceptable quality/render time balance.

If you do a search you'll find people with the same results a little while ago. Something about their cpu's being fully optimized when only rendering to certain types of files[100% per cpu]. The others only utilized a small percentage of what their computer could do[25% per cpu]. This will probably be boosted in a update in the future. The quality is so good in the final product that I can except that. I would rather have quality/longer rendering times than CRAP!!!/minutes. As long as they make it a priority to be fixed soon of course. :D

I posted about pinnacle being optimized for the AMD XP dual processing workstation. They claim to be able to utilize 100% of both processors. You could read this article at the AMD web site at www.amd.com. Can anyone find out if this holds water. Just curious. Later.

Yea, right, Control_Z. Lots of returns OR a class action lawsuit OR, how about a lot of hot air.

SF has provided a quality piece of software at a very reasonable price. When I first came across VegasVideo, it was, for me, in that price realm where I could only imagine the luxury of using it's rich feature set.

Now, the package is even more capable, and the price puts it within reach of most any determined video editor (or would-be editor).

Do you really think your empty threat of a class action suit will stimulate SF product development?

Do you really expect other users to support your threat by joining your class?

I've spent hours rendering (in several different editing packages . . . previous versions of VV included . . . rendering at various speeds . . . sometimes fast, sometimes slow) only to review an end product with at least one major glitch making it totally useless to me.

Frankly, although I am not frustrated by the extremely slow rendering times that are the subject of this thread, if I were, I would still place a much higher priority on a pleasing and usable end result than fast rendering times.

C'mon, now, stash that litigious in the round file, and let's keep this board (provided by SF, by the way) friendly, fun, and informative.

Caruso

It's obvious by the amount of replies that this is an important topic to all of us. VV3 is an excellent program which is why I was so disappointed with the rendering time. In a professional environment rendering time is very very important. I have in my editing arsenal, Speed Razor 4.5, Speed Razor 2000, VideoToaster [2], Video Factory, and Vegas Video 3.
The Sonic editors are much slower at rendering than any of the above. The Sonic editors also give much bang for the buck.
I just ordered a P4 mobo with 1.8 ghz P4 and 512 RDRAM.
I'll see what happens.

Okay, I have not received my VV3 and this issue does interest me. Does VV3 offer differing qualities (and therefore differing speeds) of rendering? If so, has anyone used a faster speed - lower quality as a final render and is the final quality noticably poorer.
Thanks,
Barry

Informative? As long as nobody reports obvious bugs?

Maybe you don't do a lot of rendering, but when it takes VV3 over FIVE times as long to render something *using the same codec (MS)* as Premiere or Razor, clearly there's a serious fault which needs to be addressed quickly.

And it's awfully dishonest to keep advertising VV3 as SMP aware if it really isn't, except in rare circumstances.

I like VV3 too and don't want to try to return it, but I'd like someone at SF to at least figure out a solution. Reinstall, a patch, _something_ besides cheerleaders on the forum.

For the record, I just rendered a 10 minute video to an NTSC DV .avi file in 27 minutes. I have a p4 1.5 Ghz w 256 MB RAM. The video contained avi files captures by VV3 video capture and contained an average amount of effects, transistions, etc.. I'm not complaining at all.

Maybe you don't do a lot of rendering, but when it takes VV3 over FIVE times as long to render something *using the same codec (MS)* as Premiere or Razor, clearly there's a serious fault which needs to be addressed quickly.

So you are saying that you are using microsofts codec for capture[or some other capturing software that utilizes ms codec]...then edit in VV3...then rendering in VV3.Yes/No?

Have you tried to capture with VV3 capturing utility[with ignor third party DV codecs checked and use microsoft DV codec UNCHECKED ALSO],edit,render...what are your results then.

If you did it the first way then VV3 would render out the "entire" video.
If you did it the second way then VV3 would utilize a "smart rendering" feature that will only have to rerender the parts of the video that was altered[ie:crossfades,light effects,pan/crop,etc...]. This would then cut down the process considerably!

You stated that it renders a long time with VV3 but would render quickly in other programs. Try capturing with the VV3 utility[VV3 codec NOT MS codec!]. Then edit and render in Premier,etc...What types of results are you getting?

It would make sense that you had short rendering times with premier because you were using a codec that it was optimized for.

Go to www.creativecow.net and talk to the moderators there about VV3. My questions were answered very quickly there.

What is your hardware setup. When rendering do you render at best quality,good,preview.

rendering at the 'preview' setting produces a quality end result and I've had no problems whatsoever with speed of rendering...it's actually been pretty damn quick if you ask me...the only time I've noticed any loss of quality is when I'm slowing down footage...I've read recommendations on this forum for rendering slo mo footage with the 'good' setting which will take a bit longer...there's no need to use the 'best' setting...
btw- I captured my footage with Scenalyzer Live using the MSDV codec and I'm using VV 2.0 on a Dell Latitude laptop with a pIII 600 w/128 MB RAM

In my opinion, speed is such a relative term. . . Before Vegas, I was considering a Raptor RT or a DV500+ to install on my home computer. I know people who have the Pinnacle DV500+ or the Raptor and none of them have been able to do the following. . . [BTW the Pinnacle guy loses time with every project because his system crashes at least once somewhere along the line!]

I wanted to turn-around a project really quick and I also wanted to learn how to use Vegas 3.0's features. Right before I started a new [1 hour, 2 camera shoot] project I purchased Vegas 3.0 online. I used my computer at the office to capture all of my footage to a removeable drive. Vegas took everything off the minidv's while I was in meetings/at appointments. I finished the sound track while I was still at the office and took the drive home and continued to edit the rest of my footage. Because I was wanting to try out a lot of Vegas' features, I fiddled with a lot of settings and was impressed to be able to preview everything on either computer.

Before calling it a night, I reviewed everything from beginning to end and then hit "print to tape". A 1 hour project with many transitions and a few special effects at the beginning and end took 3 1/2 hours to render on my 1000mhz Athlon. I didn't care because I was asleep!

At the office again, I decided to watch everything on a monitor while it was transfering to tape. At the very end of the production I wanted to change something [I just had an idea after-the-fact]. Vegas only took 1/2 hour to make the changes. I started the transfer from the beginning again and everything turned out just like I wanted.

Vegas works great for me because I need to do some editing at work and some at home. [I do projects for both work and for family/friends.] I like the idea of not being "tied" to the one computer that has the hardware assisted editing card. This flexibility saves me a lot of TIME when and where it counts. IMO the time saved when I am able to work & edit is more important to me than when the project is all finished. Plus, if either develops a glitch, I can always work on the other one!

I just finished a one-hour, ten minute video, a two-camera project where I needed the audio to run uninterrupted. I also own Pinnacle's consumer editing products, StudioDV and S7, both nice packages. Neither comes close to VV3 in ease of editing, flexiblilty, clean and accurate isolation of frames.

I'm able to vary the velocity of a video event easily and, yet, keep the audio in tact.

I'm sure this may not be something that excites some of you who are more sophisticated, but it is exactly the sort of features I needed to be able to impress those who will look at my videos. VV3 gives me what I need at an affordable price.

My project required quite a few video velocity changes, numerous adjustments to brightness, contrast, HSL, etc.

Also, VV3 doesn't seem to be fussy as to the state (format) of the clips you drag to the timeline, another nice feature. My final project included some already-rendered subproject, some .veg projects, some still photos, etc. VV3 handled them all without complaining.

As to rendering time, I didn't time anything, but the shorter "sub-renders" seemed to be completed in reasonable enough time (rendered them while I took a coke break), and the final project I set to render during the day while I was at work.

As has already been stated on this thread, aside from the quality results it delivers, one of the greatest features of VV3 is its reliability. During the entire edit process of this project, VV3 crashed not one time, not during editing, rendering, capturing, or print to tape.

The final output looks just the way I expected it to look, no unexpected glitches, no surprises at all.

For what it's worth, I'm running Windows XP pro on a 900 mhz machine with 128 megs RAM and capture/render to a combination of 7200 RPM IDE drives and 5400 RPM Maxtor external firewire drives. VV3 is not fussy about my choice of drives, although I avoid rendering to or from the drive where I have the program installed, and, where possible, like to render from one drive to another (source files on other than destination drive and vice versa).

Works for me, and I'm loving it. I'm off this afternoon to shoot my two kids in a three hour recital in NYC. I'll be using three cameras this time, and we're all gonna have some fun playing with VegasVideo as we edit this footage over the holiday weekend (concert will be excellent, too, LOL).

Caruso - - oops, forgot to mention that, since there was no convenient breaking point in my project, I output it using the DV Cam as a pass through to my SVideo VCR. VV3 output was smooth, quality looks fine to these untrained eye. Love this program. C

Frankly I don't know what the obsession is with some demanding faster rendering. Its the same tune in the vcdhelp forum and others. I'm waitng for some guy to say he built a quad XP AMD 1600 and then complain it took and hour twenty minutes to render a hour ten minute video.

To be even more blunt I suspect those doing the compalining have little confidence in their editing abilities and thus wait for the "final" work fearful it didn't turn out right.

Rendering should be a no brainer step. I start it and go do something else. Period. I don't care if a render takes hours or all night. So what? I actually have a life beyond video editing. Constantly checking up and then stewing in your own juices because the rendering isn't done or not going as fast as you think it should or because another application does it faster will only result in raising your blood pressure. :-)