Been doing that for ages. I edit and preview on my spiffy machine, then copy the directory with the project and media files over to my old machine to render. Yeah, it takes 3 times as long on the old machine, but hey, it just sits there idle anyway and then i can keep working on CPU intensive stuff on the spiffy.

Will probably be building a duplicate of my spiffy next weekend and then move the old one down to the living room to become a media player to feed the projector.

What about network rendering? Anybody do that successfully?

Network rendering only works with .AVI rendering and, all things considered, it doesn't gain you much in the way of speed.

If all the project's assets are in the same folder, the network is fast enough and you have all the necessary plugins and fonts installed on the rendering machine, all one needs to do is open the .VEG file on the "main" machine from the rendering machine. Vegas will find all the assets and render away.

I can see the logic of rendering on the slow machine but personally I prefer to render on the fastest machine available. My reason for this is that, especially after viewing the first render, you inevitaby find an error ( of your own making ) and have to render again.
Of course greater diligence before rendering would solve this, but I usually still find something that I have overlooked

I don't think that I've ever rendered anything just once. However, I have one non-networked PC that is only used for Vegas/DVDA. It's not fast, but it's never, ever crashed.

Network rendering only works with .AVI rendering and, all things considered, it doesn't gain you much in the way of speed.

Actually, that is not exactly correct.

For distributed network rendering where you want to have more than one PC do the rendering, it IS correct. However, if you just want to have another PC on the network handle the rendering, that can be done with any format. Just don't put a tick mark in the distributed networking box. I use this feature all the time. It provides the same thing that Kelly gets by first copying all the files to the remote PC, but avoids having to duplicate all those files on another drive (and later having to remember if they are exact duplicates are not when you go to clean up the project), and of course avoids that extra step in the workflow. While network rendering can be a little flaky to set up, once it is working, it is sweet.

John, you're absolutely right, I should have used the correct terminology; "distributed network rendering."

Most of the time, I just launch Vegas on one of the networked machines, navigate to the .VEG file on the "host" machine, load the .VEG and render away.

John

Most of the time, I just launch Vegas on one of the networked machines, navigate to the .VEG file on the "host" machine, load the .VEG and render away.

Yeah, that's a much easier way than doing the network render I described, as long as all the video assets are in the same folder as the VEG file. If they are all over the place, then when you open the VEG file and it can't find the files that aren't in the same folder, you have to specify new locations. In that case, the network render option can be easier. It is nice that Vegas gives us options to do things like this in many different ways.

One solution I've been toying with is to keep everything on a NAS box.
Now it shouldn't be too hard to also connect one or more dedicated render boxes to the network. Once editing is completed the .veg file could be copied to a folder that a simple app checks and then kicks off Vegas on the render box.
This approach avoids the problem of "OMG, which version is that?", I too have had several panic attacks over that when you start shuffling stuff around with multiple copies of what "should" be the same thing. Also by having everything in the one place on the network it makes backup much easier.

Bob.

Typically, all my assets are in a single folder except for "reusable" media like regular client's graphics, music and animated logos that reside on a server. All the machines on the network have the server's drives mapped to the same drive letters. It doesn't matter if the .VEG is looking for files on the "Q" drive, for example, as the "Q" drive is the same on all the machines.