I'm guessing it's probably true.

JJK

No I just duplicated this with a tga image on top and moving video on the bottom and on my Athlon 3200 (running at 3 quarters speed -- I have it stepped down from full power at the moment) it took about a minute and a half.

(Of course that was just rendering -- I wasn't outputting to tape)

That render time is very slow. Pinnacle Liquid and Adobe Premiere Pro and AVID Xpress Pro blow this away. It would take about 10 seconds in Pinnacle to prep this for output. Why does Vegas take so long? I was so excited about the new upgrade. The folks at NAB totally fool you when they have everything the play all prerendered. That really is a joke!

Yeah, well...those guys at NAB really fool you when they show you Premiere, Liquid, and Xpress Pro when they're running with hardware acceleration too. Premiere renders about 10% faster than Vegas does, with a great deal more aliasing. Express Pro renders about 10 % faster than Vegas does, with the same aliasing.
Liquid Edition is actually slower than Vegas if you don't use background rendering.

comparing apples to apples is usually a good thing, and you're not making straight across comparisons.

Don't some of the Liquid systems run in the thousands of dollars? If so, I'd expect it to render faster. Can't speak to the others. Though I'm a former Premiere user, and the day I first used Vegas I switched over immediately and never looked back. Seriously, I don't think I've launched Premiere once since the first time I used Vegas.

The time I save in workflow alone probably cancels out any slower rendering times--if indeed Vegas is slower. I don't have the time or inclination to time this out myself.

Pinnacle Liquid and Adobe Premiere Pro and AVID Xpress Pro blow this away

And you personally compared all four packages using the exact same source material on the exact same hardware?

Rob

The Premiere systems shown at the trade events are using Matrox hardware. Pinnacle uses their hardware, and Avid uses Mojo when they demo. These are all hardware acceleration systems.
Vegas doesn't use hardware acceleration. This is its beauty and its bane. There is nothing other than Canopus that uses acceleration (yet) for HDV, so they are all about the same speed for HDV, but for DV, hardware acceleration is all but gone. This is part of why Adobe quit partnering with Canopus and Matrox. Now hardware vendors are on their own, writing drivers themselves for the applications with little manufacturer support.

Vegas saves a ton of time in the workflow stage, "conforming" is a word I'll bet less than half the Vegas users out there even know.
Yeah, Vegas is one of the slower render toys on the block (until Version 6) but it consistently turns out much higher quality footage.
For comparison, render a page curl in Vegas, Adobe Premiere, Avid, Ulead, Canopus Edius, or Liquid. Look at the edges of the curl on a frozen frame. Vegas is smooth and sweet. The others are heavily aliased. This is just one of several comparison tests you can do to determine what/how Vegas is working differently.
Vegas 6 (for me) delivers significantly faster render times. Your mileage may vary depending on your computer, it's proc, and how you've configured it. I don't have the latest and greatest system right now, and it's plenty fast. I don't like 12 hour renders on deep composites, but I remember 5-6 years ago having to wait DAYS to do this same sort of work. Remember when Lucas talked about ILM's render farms taking 2 weeks to render a few seconds of footage?

Thanks for everyone's help.
John

Mr Spot,
Any chance we can see the completed movie of that 27 track project?

re Render times, never had any problems with Vegas 4's render speed ... if anything the big slowdown for my web video work comes when using other software to convert the uncompressed avi from Vegas into flv or other compressed formats..

rendering avis straight from Vegas has always been reasonably fast, no problems there... it's getting compressed files, especially .flvs done, that takes a lot of time, biggest 80% chunk from a workflow standpoint for the web stuff I do.. fwiw

good point Spot and others, re video quality, aliasing, comparisons... interesting to learn other peoples' experiences.. thanks..

ken

John, a few things you could check:
A- The alpha channel on the Targa may be slowing things down. Alpha channel operations are slow in Vegas... and I would expect the same of other programs unless they are ignoring it.
B- Use "good" quality to render, and not best. Best takes more times, and sometimes gives worse looking results (subjectively looks worse sometimes in my opinion).
C- You might also want to go file --> project properties and click on the folder icon to match the project settings to the AVI file. A mismatch would slow Vegas down.
D- Vegas assumes the image file has square pixels and will resize according to fit DV's pixel aspect ratio. You can turn this off to match the other programs, and this'll speed things up.
Go into the pan/crop tool. Under interpolation? turn off match pixel aspect ratio.

On my system, it takes about 60 seconds to render:
PSD image, pixel aspect correction turned off, no resizing, alpha chanel. Targa doesn't seem to maintain transparency when exporting from Photoshop or something.

AVI file on bottom, resized and moved (it also shows through the top PSD image). Over 30 seconds, it resizes itself and moves.

File --> render as.

Rendering with 2 threads.

Pentium 2.6"C" 2.6ghz, 800FSB, hyperthreading, 512kb cache, no SSE3, "C" version Pentium is slower than Prescott at Vegas, 2X256MB RAM dual channel (probably single sided sticks). Itunes and other stuff running in background, like this firefox window I'm using to type my reply. Should see a few percent increase in performance when running clean system.

Friends, it's mighty faster than the 1997 Avid I work on at my day job!