Thought I was the only one this drove crazy. It drives me nuts to have to selectively rendered each piece over and over again when I move it around and don't make any other changes. Is there a reason for this behavior?
I don't have much experience with fcp, but I think someone was telling me the other day that it retains its version of selectively prerendered material. That would be huge.

Yes, I agree it would be great if Vegas didn't lose the pre-rendered reference...

I actually think it is rather strange. I mean, IF vegas creates an avi file during the pre-render, the loss of pre-render on the timeline in effect is only at referall level; the avi file still remains in the pre-rendered folder (so that is why I assume we can actually physically recover the pre-rendered file, even if it has disappeared from the timline, and add it as a take/or place it on a new track manually...Or am I completely barking up the wrong tree?
But there again that would be sort of akin to rendering to a new track, so in practise pre-rendering is of no real use (but does help keeping the house tidier...).

Maybe a script could help on this one...there again, I know nothing about scripting....

. .anybody listenning ? .. you sure .. ? well, now that everybody has gone off for lunch or whatever, go to the pre-render folder and you will find all those neat little pre-renders . . I re-use them alot and bring them back onto the t/l and make adjust ments to the exact area that was givig me grief . . . but don't tell anybody else . .yeah?

If you knew this already .. apologies . .. but as long as you haven't cleaned-out your pre-render folder they will be there . .. AND yes it would be real neat if there was a type of SMART remembering thingie to activate that WOULD auto thre pre-renders back into place . .

. . look out they're coming back from lunch or breakfast . .or their siesta or whatever they've been doing . .. .

. .. . shhhhhh .. grazie . .. . .

Hmm, I only use selective pre-render when I need a really good preview of a small section of what I'm working on. I use it more of a selective preview tool than anything else. I know it has to happen when you print from timeline, but I seldom do that.

Michael

I think "render to a new take" would be a wonderfull tool indeed...

I think "render to a new take" would be a wonderfull tool indeed...

Agreed, I think that would be ideal!
Randy

ditto here . .

I think the thing people don't fully grok is that pre-renders are of ranges on the timeline-not of events. If anything moves there then the prerender is useless as far as Vegas knows.

Obviously, what people want is for their process on events or sets of events to prerender and stay prerendered when they move the event. This is so obviously useful that it's hard for us to get our heads around the fact that Vegas doesn't do it. It's doing prerenders in ranges of project time-not to events.

Render to a new take is great except that doesn't take multiple events into account. Rather, you might want to be able to select a range or set of events and choose a command like "Make Sequence" (or "Make Scene": ;>) that would take your range and make it into a little "sub veg" file that then can be automatically prerendered in the background. You could move the sub veg around just like any event, and maybe even apply media FX to it as if it was a media file. And of course you'd want to be able to open the "sub veg" and edit the parts-but that would remove the prerender.

In the same way, you ought to be able to drop an Acid program onto the timeline and have it prerender in the background-if you own Acid.

You see where I'm going, though. That's a nested veg file I just described.

Rob Mack

Oh, and maybe all this more aggressive prerendering might require you to be more careful about allocating enough storage to handle it.

And don't get me wrong, rendering to a new take is fine but that's an event level solution-great for prerendering media FX but not useful for rendering a transition between events.

Rob Mack

Rob,

" . . pre-renders are of ranges on the timeline-not of events. " yes I do realise this. And well, if this is useless it still has a "piece" of pre-render somewhere that COULD be of use. That's my point.

"Obviously, what people want is for their process on events or sets of events to prerender and stay prerendered when they move the event." Well not really. I want to be able to rely on those parts or MICRO bits and pieces to be recalled IF they haven't been aready pre-rendered then Vegas would have to do it. What's so wrong with this?

I don't care that - "It's doing prerenders in ranges of project time-not to events." If I've got some pre-render stuff, why not re-use? It just seems so obvious.

OK, I'll give you, "Render to a new take is great except that doesn't take multiple events into account. Rather, you might want to be able to select a range or set of events and choose a command like "Make Sequence" " . . .my only point is that having got stuff somewhere that IS pre-rendered - and that IS taking up space - have Vegas just reuse it. Nothing More . . Nothing Less!

Best regards Rob,

Grazie

Yah, I know what you're saying. I'm not supporting what vegas does here. I'm saying that when Vegas prerenders, for example, frames 1000-2000 of the program and then you do anything that changes what occurs on those frames then the prerender breaks. Vegas didn't prerender your effect-it prerendered those specific frames of the overall project. It's not what people want in a prerender.

BTW, the idea of going and getting the prerender file and putting it on the timeline is clever.

On the point of "render to take", since it wouldn't work for transitions why not have a prerender track? Isn't part of the complaint that Vegas always makes a new track when you "render to new track"? In a way, Vegas already has a prerender track, it's just that it's only a few pixels high and doesn't seem to respond to any sort of ripple. (it's the prerender indicator at the top of the timeline-you could think of it as a prerender track if you squint just right) Maybe just make it a formal track, like a buss track.

Granted, those prerenders ought to at least move when you ripple edit all tracks, (CTRL+SHIFT+F). Given the way it works I wouldn't expect prerenders to persist when you ripple with a simple "F" or "CTRL+F"

Rob

Rob . . thanks for the recognition, but others gave me this one, - I do think you/we have a point. That which is rendered and NOT changed it should be reused, if left well alone . . UNTIL it is changed. What i want is that vegas does automatically that which I'm doing manually.

This has come up before . . it will come up again . . I can't believe Sony aren't looking at it too . . . let's hope eh?

Good thread this,

Grazie

Rob,

I too see the take issue....BUT, i would still rather have PART of the pre-rendered file as a take, even if Vegas did have to render the transitions again...It would still be a huge timesaver...After all, it's not that we pre-render huge % of projects now anyway...so those little bits of compositing/3d/generated media which we might choose to pre-render would make previewing nicer...Oh, I forgot, we have render to a new track for all that...*grin*

As for the ripple bit, maybe some sort of grouping function could help, except of course if things are changed within the events themselves...

And again, if the pre-render gave us a pointer in the media pool, the user would have the choice to recover it without having to dive into the explorer etc... It's all actually there: it just needs a little TLC...

Mind you I did read somewhere that Acid Pro 5 would incoporate nested timeline features (rumours rumours...)...maybe a test for Vegas 6?

Anyway, good constructive thread I think....

Paul.

Another approach is to use the concept of a "dirty flag." This is common programmers parlance for a bit that is set to denote whether a certain object has been changed from the time it was last changed.

The brute force approach would be to have a flag for every frame on every track, but that would be stupid. A better approach would be to define ranges for each pre-render, and then if any change is made to any track within that range, set the dirty flag for that pre-render, indicating that it is no longer valid. The key thing is that simply moving the range (that is, changing its start/stop timecode) would NOT set the dirty flag.

How easy or hard this would be to implement depends entirely on the internal data structures in Vegas. One of the things that sets apart the men from the boys -- at least when it comes to programming -- is how cleverly the data structures are designed. I suspect that Vegas was probably pretty-well done internally (although I am sure that some of the engineering team wishes they had donoe some of it differently -- this is always the case). Hopefully they can do something to improve this in the next release because it is crazy to have to constantly re-render sections that don't have one pixel different than before, but which have simply been moved along the timeline.