CPU usage seems to fluctuate and is based on what is actually being rendered. On my machine straight DV without any FX applied will use 100% of all cores, when FX come into play it will lower to approx 50%.
When rendering HDV i have yet to see it go past 60%

There is definitely a point about what the format/codec can handle in terms of simultaneous threads/processes that will have a factor in CPU% usage

There is at least one setting that affects this; how many rendering threads have you specified?

<< There is at least one setting that affects this; how many rendering threads have you specified?>>

I'm just using the default which is set to 4 in Preferences->Video->Rendering Threads, and my Dynamic Ram is set to 1024. Other than that I'm using the defaults.

The video was captured using WinDV, I believe the codec is dvsd.

Matt

I hit about 95% on a quad core when rendering HDV.

(BTW.... your dynamic ram is too high You should not need 1024 and funny things happen when you set it that high

128 to 256 is a good setting and works for most situations.

Imagine what rendering actually means. First Vegas will decode the video using an external decoder, then it passes the decoded video to a (set of) filters. These may also be written by someone else (if you use third-party filters) and then to some transition code, again, perhaps not Vegas code. All of these may not utilize all the CPUs, and in those cases you will not see very high CPU usage.

If you render from DV-AVI or MPEG-2 (HDV) with Vegas filters and transitions you will generally get full CPU utilization, once you put other stuff in that mix, you may or may not.