Unfortunately, unlike Studio DV and other products, VideoFactory does not have this feature. Even if you do a cuts-only project, it re-renders the whole thing and creates a file (or files) just as big as the original (minus anything you've actually cut out). Now, it may or may not re-compress/re-render the parts that contain the original video, but if all it is doing is copying from the original file to the new file, it is the world's slowest copy operation. Q.E.D., it must be re-rendering. It is the single biggest flaw in VideoFactory, because it dramatically reduces the size of the project you can handle on a given size disk, and it enormously increases the time from video capture to print-to-tape, especially with projects that consist mostly of cuts and a few transitions.

I still use VideoFactory quite a bit, because it is so good in many other respects, but I curse it every time I click on "Make Movie."

JohnMeyer, i'm not quite sure what you're comments about "file sizes just as big as the original" is about. If your source material is DV and your output file is DV, then of course it will be the same size. If you want a smaller output file size, then you'll have to render to a more compressed format like MPEG, WMV, or RealMedia. However, any of these formats will drastically increase the render time.

Files captured from VideoWave apparently aren't true DV compatible files. This is why VideoFactory has to rerender then. You should try capturing directly from VideoFactory's VideoCapture utility instead. This will give you true DV files, and if you have downloaded the newer 2.0b or 2.0c updates, you will also be using Sonic Foundry's excellent new DV codec instead of the old Microsoft one.

One thing i found was that VideoFactory often seems to re-render an entire event if any portion of it has effects, crossfades, transitions, etc. applied to it. Any event that is entirely unaltered will be simply file copied. What i do is split the event just before and just after any transitions. In one project i was working on, this decreased the render time from 11 hours to under half an hour.

I've heard some users report in this forum that VideoFactory does this detection automatically for them. I haven't been able to get it to work unless i put the splits in manually. Vegas seems to do this detection quite well.

Chienworks, I think I understand what he is saying. When I was using IntroDV that came with my camera, when I went to print to tape, I did NOT have to render a complete new version of the movie. It simply rendered the modified portions to proxy files and then output the mixture. Meaning that if I started with a 20 gig avi file, I did not have to render another 20 gig to the hard drive to print it back to the tape. It only rendered smaller portions of the file and then mixxed them together while outputting. Not only was this faster, but it didn't require me to purchase the extra 100gig drive like when I started using VF. I was able to make due with the 40gig only. :)

When printing DV files to tape, Studio DV and other DV applications do not create new files for the portions of your input video that are unaltered. Thus, in the case of a video that simply consists of trimming and rearanging input video, these other applications require zero rendering time, and do not create any new files. If you insert transitions, these other applications only render the new video required by the transition. During the print to tape process, these other programs use the edit decision list to play back the original input video in a different order, interspersing it with any transitions that have been created. What I meant about "file sizes just as big as the original" is that with VideoFactory, you must render to a new file in order to print to tape and that file can be as big as the original source material (if you use all the source material, and simply rearange the order of the shots). By contrast, with these other programs that I just described, there is no new video created. Thus, you not only eliminate needless "rendering" (which really isn't rendering, since the output video is identical to the input video when you are only doing cuts), but more important, you can create a much larger project in a given disk space because you only need to leave room on your disk for the titles, transitions, etc. that need to be rendered. The difference in productivity is enormous. This feature make a HUGE difference, and is therefore not a minor deal.

Compression isn't part of this equation because I'm talking about DV input material, with the print to tape also being in DV format. DV is a constant 3.5 MBs, and unlike MPEG, you can't vary the compression.

Hope that helps explain what I meant.

John