You are doing TWO things at once: rendering and encoding. The render part is the creation of new video (transitions, fX, etc.). The encoding part is the translation from DV AVI to MPEG-2. On your computer encoding should be slightly faster than real time. Thus, if you just stick a ten minute AVI on the timeline and simply render that to MPEG-2 without doing anything else, it should take a little under ten minutes, assuming single pass VBR encoding (i.e., the DVD Architect NTSC Template -- do NOT use the "default" template -- ever).

Encoding always takes the same amount of time. By contrast, rendering will be different for each project and, without doing a whole lot, you can end up with extraordinarily long render times. You can get an idea -- for fX at least -- what sort of times we're talking about by reading this:

Results of render times for ALL Vegas fX

John -
Thanks - that knowledge is so valuable.

Now a DVD - NTSC - Vegas question...
I put a "Broadcast render" video effect on the preview screen, but the DVD's look super crushed in the shadow details -

Is Vegas seeing this Broadcast filter when I "render as" an MPEG2? or should I prerender the whole schmazoo to a new track with the filter on the track, first (which actually seems like a good idea to me, now, vis a vis your "rendering vs encoding" input.

What do you (or anyone else with experience in this matter) think?

v

Kudos on putting that together, John.

Gary

Victor,

The 'wisdom' these days is that working with DVDs is much less problematic in terms of staying within legal luminance ranges. So unless your signal is really way out of kilter, the Broadcast filter is probably unnecessary.

Gary

John - do you network render? I am building another PC for a render farm, but I read somewhere that I can only renderfarm AVI files. Is this correct?

Steve Mann

If you have one copy of Vegas, then you cannot network render mpg, while you can other outputs. Sony, I believe, will sell you more licenses for the x-number of PCs on your render network.

The answer is tied in with my original answer: Network rendering is just that, namely rendering. You cannot network encode which means that you cannot speed up the MPEG-2 encoding by farming it out over the network.

Network rendering is great for one specific thing: speeding short, but fX-intensive renders. If you have a ten minute clip that takes two days to render, then network rendering is your friend. However, if you have a two hour project that takes four hours to render and you want to reduce the time, then you will find that the overhead from moving two hours of video back and forth over the network and then stitching it all back together again at the end of the process pretty much wipes out any gains from having multiple computers work on the project.

"If you have one copy of Vegas, then you cannot network render mpg, while you can other outputs. Sony, I believe, will sell you more licenses for the x-number of PCs on your render network."

The license from Sony allows you to renderfarm on up to two additional computers without additional licenses.

" The answer is tied in with my original answer: Network rendering is just that, namely rendering. You cannot network encode which means that you cannot speed up the MPEG-2 encoding by farming it out over the network."

DOH!

You would think that by now I would know the difference from rendering and encoding....

Steve Mann