Sorry forgot to give the hardware details.

Athlon XP 2600+ (2.18 GHz), 512 MB RAM, IBM 7200 rpm disks w/ 8 MB cache. Windows XP Pro. Processor is pretty much 100% busy during rendering.

Maybe I'm just expecting too much. Should I render to AVI first and then use DVDA to do the rest?

Thanks,
P-O Litby
politby@sun.com

depending on what you are rendering - that is what the content of the material is, a lot of movement, transitions, etc - rendering is a bear!

but....I have a project that I've have been doing (a ten minute compilation) that takes about 1/2 hour to render to MPEG2. My PC is somewhat slower than yours, so I'm sure it is not the PC speed that is at issue here.

Hope that helps

You also haven't said if you are using a variable or constant bit rate. Variable bit rates take MUCH, MUCH longer to encode than constant. It would be a good idea to make an AVI first also, since it is a better format for archiving to tape.

The biggest improvement -- by far -- that you can get in rendering time is to render to a different disk. Not a different partition (i.e., drive letter) on the same physical hard disk, but a separate physical hard disk. Even better if it is external (Firewire) or on a separate IDE channel.

By way of illustration, just yesterday I needed to render MPEG2 for a one hour fifty-five minute video. I started the render, and on my 2.8 GHz P4, the darn thing was still chugging away almost five hours later. This was an AVI file that had already been rendered, so there was absolutely nothing Vegas needed to do, other than render the MPEG2 from a DV AVI file. Then, as luck would have it, at the 98% mark, I tripped on a cable, crashing my computer.

Bummer.

However, after unburdening myself of a few choice epithets, I started to figure out why the aborted render had taken so long in the first place. When I looked at the file that had been created (to see if I could salvage something) I realized that I had stupidly rendered back to the same hard disk where all the captured AVI files reside. Oops. I then started the exact same render, from the beginning, only this time I remembered to put the rendered results on a separate hard drive (a Firewire drive). Two hours and twenty-five minutes later, the render was finished. Not quite a 2:1 difference, but close.

Nothing else you do will even come close to the difference that rendering to a separate hard disk can make. Do it, and see for yourself.

Is there a reason why you're rendering NTSC DV->PAL MPEG2? That's a lot slower than NTSC DV->NTSC MPEG2.

Do you mean differenct disk from the AVI or different from the OS.

I was not aware the having the MPEG render on a different disk than the AVI produced such a time differnece.

I'm going to try this out tonight!

Do you mean differenct disk from the AVI or different from the OS.

It doesn't matter. Just find a different physical hard disk than the one used to store your captured AVI files, internal or external, and render to that.

quote: "Is there a reason why you're rendering NTSC DV->PAL MPEG2? That's a lot slower than NTSC DV->NTSC MPEG2"

I was wondering the same thing. If you really do have to go from NTSC to PAL, disabling resampling will speed things up a hell of a lot (select all video events, right click one event, go to 'switches' and choose 'disable resample')

The reason for the NTSC to PAL conversion is that my DV camera is NTSC but being in Europe I need to make DVDs for people who don't have NTSC capable playback equipment.
I have been rendering to the same physical disk where the source material is located, so I'll try rendering to a different disk to see how that works out.

thanks,
/POL

"The reason for the NTSC to PAL conversion is that my DV camera is NTSC but being in Europe I need to make DVDs for people who don't have NTSC capable playback equipment."

Besides the point you will loose quality by converting to PAL, I don't see the point in doing this. Almost everyone in Europe is capable to play and watch NTSC DVD, as long as the dvd is region free. It might not work with players, older than a few years, and TV's older then 10 years or so.
So just leave your mpeg in NTSC. It will decrease your rendering times significantly.