Vegas Really slow or is it my computer?

CDMGreer wrote on 1/22/2005, 1:51 PM

ok hi all i'm new here. I've been editing on Vegas 5.0 for about 4 months now and my first project was a ceremony for my uncle who is in the military and i captured all the footage and edited the whole thing and I thought it looked really good and i went to render and it would be about 1 or 2 frames a second as and .AVI and it wasn't even on the highest quality. Now as i say that i am only 15 you may think that it's the computer but let me say that my computer is runnin 3.2Ghz P4 at 2 Gigs of Ram, 2x250 gig hard drives and a GForce FX 5500 at 256Mb runnin dual 19inch flat crt moniters. so i don't believe its my computer. now i made another project about a month or so ago which was about 13 minutes and it had some parts with 6 levels of video and graphics and my computer rendered it in about 12minutes. Then I went to render a concert i had taped and it said it would take about 2 and 1/2 hours as a .AVI with no compression. I'm so lost if anyone can help me or give me any ideas it would be great. any other questions just ask and i will reply. Thanks everyone
Kyle Greer CDM-----Creative Digital Media

Comments

epirb wrote on 1/22/2005, 1:58 PM

are you rendering the DV avi timelime to AVI uncompressed? What render template are you choosing? Also did you add any Blur effects to any events,many of those will significantly increase render times.

CDMGreer wrote on 1/22/2005, 2:06 PM

ok as for the fact that i am 15 i have very little training in the feild so i do not understand the first question but the second question i render to NTSC DV and the video rendering quality is set to Best and for the concert and the ceremony there are no effects. Both of these projects that take a long time to render are also quite long (1:30) but I had another concert that was the same length and it rendered in 12 minutes. Thanks
Kyle Greer CDM----Creative Digital Media

Former user wrote on 1/22/2005, 2:08 PM

Make sure you haven't accidentally changed the opacity of the video track. This is a control on the left of the track. It should be at 100.

Dave T2

CDMGreer wrote on 1/22/2005, 2:13 PM

for which track i have a water mark so that is at 30% and the video is at 100% and all other graphics are at 100%

FrigidNDEditing wrote on 1/22/2005, 2:51 PM

Ah There's the rub. Doing something like that will slow down your render. my guess is that you didn't do any things like that when you rendered your concert, right?

Vegas can fly through and AVI file if all is doing is re-encoding files with no special effects, however (and this is with every NLE that I've used) if you add things like transparency, or light rays, or other various special effects, it's a lot longer render time because each frame has to go through more rigerous proccessing.

Hope that helps.

Dave

CDMGreer wrote on 1/22/2005, 3:10 PM

ok my other project which has no effects but is about 1:30 long does the one frame per second deal and i don't think thats right, is it? Also when i put an effect on a part of video when i first got my computer the frame rate wouldn't change in the preview, now when i put an affect on it slows down to about 4-9 frames a second (thats just the preview at the bottem left of the screen). the actual video is 29.970 FPS. even with the high performance of my computer it should still take that long to do render with FX and or graphics?

PeterWright wrote on 1/22/2005, 6:17 PM

Having render quality set to best will slow things down a fair bit. For most projects Best will have no advantage over "Good", unless you've done certain things such as resizing stills.

Try Good and see if it makes a difference.

CDMGreer wrote on 1/22/2005, 11:36 PM

thanks for the info
Kyle Greer CDM-------Creative Digital Media

Blues_Jam wrote on 1/23/2005, 12:24 AM

The nature of your problems seems to indicate some randomness... ?

Any applications running in the background, especially peer-to-peer protocols such as Bittorrent, Kazaa, Gnutella, etc., etc., etc., can greatly load down your processor. This is especially true for P2P even when you THINK they are shut down because no interface GUI is running.

Blues

smurph wrote on 1/25/2005, 8:42 AM

Try muting the track with the watermark and then rendering the project to see the difference having the addition of that type of track makes.

To save time since you're only doing a comparison, select about 10 seconds (at a spot which includes all elements of the project subject to testing) of the timeline and render both with and without the track muted, keeping everything else the same. The percent difference will usually translate out to the total difference if the watermark is involved for the whole project.

This type of 10 second comparison is good for testing out relative render times for all sorts of processor-intensive effects like color correction, motion blur, etc.

To test your computer, it is advisable to run the "Render Test" which is a test .veg available at www.sundancemediagroup.com. Register/Log in. Click on "Vegas Tutorials > under Author, choose DSE and under Category, choose Tool/Aid -- it's at the bottom. Render to NTSC DV .avi template. I would guess your system should probably come in at around 1:32. This is a good gauge to see if the system itself has changed in any way from time to time.

BillyBoy wrote on 1/25/2005, 9:51 AM

Many thing effect rendering time beyond what PC you use regardless how powerful it is. Not in any particular order things to avoid if possible if you don't want "slow" rendering:

1. Avoid "best" quality and try "good" first, more often than not good is more than good enough.

2. Changes in source frame size to something else for your project size.

3. Changes in file formats like going from AVI to MPEG or the other way around.

4. Multiple tracks. While a nice feature, this of course can add a lot to rendering time.

5. Certain filters. Some are rather slow. Median for example is a killer and will cause your render times to drag.

6. For any project more than a few minutes long it pays to take the time to save your project, then shutdown your system, restart and THEN render with nothing else rendering. This simple step frees all resources so Windows has more wiggle room resulting in somewhat faster renders. For long projects of a hour or more on a similar system to yours I can usually cut a hour or more from the rendering time.

7. Avoid having one set of values under your project settings then rendering to something else. Vegas will do it, but it tends to slow it down.

8. If you don't already, use a dedicated hard drive just for rendering and defrag often.

Finally and perhaps most important before doing any rendering be sure that your system is really running and setup as it should be. A sluggish system will impead Windows and no software, Vegas included will run as fast or as well as it could if you didn't take the time to tweak your system. Many, many web sities give all kinds of suggestions, some good, some not so good. Trial and error is your friend. What's best for MY system may not be for YOUR system.

Other things to consider include overclocking and using faster memory. Over time, especially for projects that take a long time to render this can cut rendering times anywhere from 5 to maybe 15% or a little more.