Dennis,

I believe I experienced something similar when I first jumped off the VideoWave bandwagon into the VideoFactory area. Like SonicEPM stated, it's most likely because VideoFactory is not friendly with the MGI DV codec. Therefore, when re-rendering the files, VideoFactory sees the little differences made by the MGI codec and says, "Wait a minute, this looks like an edit," and ends up recompressing everything. Yes, it takes an enormous amount of time, but I have a possible workaround for you (keep in mind, this worked when using rendered footage from VideoWave 3 in VideoFactory 1):

1. Open your project in VideoFactory.
2. Look for your video preview window in the lower-right-hand part of your screen. Above the preview window should be the quality selector. Set it to "Preview" or "Draft".
3. In the past, I found that putting the quality to a lower setting somehow adjusted VideoFactory's "sensitivity" when handling other DV codecs. When it was set to "Good" or higher, VideoFactory would recompress about 50% of the file, which was undesirable. When I set is to a lower setting, it only recompressed edits, dramatically speeding up render times.

Again, I don't know if this little trick still works, but it's worth a try. If it doesn't, try changing the render quality settings in the project properties or the render template. I can help you do this if you need my assistance.

Hope this helps,
Nick LaMartina

Thank you both for the advice. I played a bit with the settings and must have come up with the right combination. This last render was about 45 mins for my 30 min show. Big time improvement. I would love to trash the VW4 program and will do so when I am confident that I won't need it for anything. I had a feeling that the long rendering may have had something to do with Video Factory having to read the VW4 codecs but wasn't sure. Greatly appeciated ! Thanks!

I am VW 5 reject as well, but am still using it for superimposing one video over another. For the rest, especially compared to VW version 4, there is nothing that FV cannot do.

Well, here is another VW4 reject. I just finished a 50 min movie with VF2. I started first with VW4 and liked a few of their video clips such as the modern count down which I faded into a title rendered and imported it in avi form into the project in video factory. All the video clips for the 50 min movie I captured using VW4. All the editing as well as the final rendering I did with VF2. During rendering I noticed that the initial opening clip with the VW4 count down on it was awfully slow and the projected rendering time was indicated at about 3 hrs. As soon as this clip was over the rendering speeded up and it finally took no more then about 48 min.
VF2 may be a bit harder to learn than VW4 but it sure is a lot more powerful, very solid and a lot of fun to use once you get the hang of it.

Paul, one thing you can do if you plan on reusing clips such as that countdown a lot is to load them onto the timeline as the only event and then render them to a new DV AVI file. From then on, you'll use this new DV AVI file in your future projects instead of the original VideoWave version. You can also do this with any other old clips you have lying around. This will speed up your future render times enormously.

Thanks for the hint Chienworks
PaulT1

Where are you finding the sensivity settings. I cannot find what your referring to. Thanks.......

Chuck1948, I believe when Nick says "sensitivity", he is referring to "Video Rendering Quality:", which is found under custom render settings for several of the codecs/file formats. The choices are Draft, Preview, Good (default), and Best.

Most people have decided that Preview doesn't look any worse than Good or Best, and choosing Preview will often render faster.

Lody, what sort of superimposing do you want to do? VideoFactory allows you to do both a picture-in-a-picture effect and mix two separate video streams with variable opacity. It won't handle chroma-key compositing, but it does the first two very well and quite easily.

Chienworks,

It's just the Chroma key feature I miss, that's all.

The other thing I use another application for is reverse video.

Are both features supported in Vegas 3? In that case I might take their offer to upgrade for $ 149.