TheDingo is exactly correct. This confuses a lot of people. When you just do a cuts-only edit, you don't want to have your original video recompressed, and thus degraded. If you select "NTSC DV" (or "PAL DV" if you're in Europe) as he suggests, the video that was simply cut will merely be rearranged, without any recompression. The quality will be bit-for-bit identical to what you started with (assuming you start with DV).

The "uncompressed" format saves the video in a non-DV format that does not use any compression (DV is, of course, compressed). The resulting files are HUGE and, as you've found, they take awhile to create.

If you want the fastest possible results when doing a cuts-only edit, send the resulting file to a different physical drive than the one that is used to store your source material. If you use garden variety IDE drives, you can get almost a 2:1 improvement in speed.

Ups, iwas not precise enough, sorry. I am using the template "NTSC format". The file size is ok (the DV was not uncompreed). And yes, i noticesd, that the process is faster, when the destination file is saved on another hd than the source. But it is very slow (about 50 frames per second, can't be normal!?).

ollle

It's very much a product of CPU and disk speed, although Vegas isn't doing any calcs it must spend some time determining for each frame that there is nothing to do. I've used MGI VideoWave for doing the same thing, just trimming clips prior to encoding and it is way, way faster than Vegas at this and it costs peanuts. Dead useless for much else of course but it again demonstrates that there's a place for many different tools and they don't have to cost heaps to be useful.

If you really want fast, use Virtualdub, set to "direct stream copy." If you up the "performance" settings a few clicks, you can easily get frame rates of 120-150/sec.

Hi johnmeyer!
Thank you very much. Good to know, it's very fast. I have to use "save old format avi"?

so long
oli