sleep. ;)

Basically what John said is true. Maybe when VV5 comes out you'll have network rendering, which means you can use other computers to add rendering power.

You can boost Vegas render speed very slightly by setting its priority to real-time.

You can also boost speeds by cleaning up your system. Check that drives are in DMA mode and not PIO. Close down unnecessary programs using Enditall (sharewave) and run --> msconfig (uncheck startup stuff you don't need). Stop unnecessary windows services.

Get a multi processor system with the fastest processors you can buy
Get the standaline Mainconcept MPEG encoder. Get the frameserver plugin.
Encode to MPEG via the frame server to the Mainconcept encoder.

Make sure you have your windows on a different drive (NOT just parition) from where you keep your video. Probably also helpful if that different drive is on a separate IDE controller (or SCSI or whatever).

An old wind up clock which loses time as it runs.

John

craftech LOL! Big time . .very very funny . . ..

You didn’t say what kind of rendering (i.e., MPEG, AVI, etc.) In addition to everyone else’s advice (which is right on); if its AVI rendering you’re doing and much of your project is straight cuts or unaltered video, then much of your rendering is a direct file copy (source to target), in which case you’ll get the biggest performance boost by have fast hard drives and make sure the target drive is physically a separate drive on a different IDE channel than your source drive. Two physical drives on the same IDE channel will serialize reads and writes so make sure they are on separate IDE channels (or use SATA). If its MPEG rendering then the processor is the bottleneck and your hard drives don’t matter as much (perhaps not at all).

~jr