in my experience it's the codec that makes the difference here. try rendering to WMV. you'll see that both processors are utilized fully.

the new DV codec also uses both processors, but not as much as WMV. the problem is, it doesn't seem like Vegas utilizes dual processing for it's plug-ins or for resizing images / video. so during rendering (depending on what you're doing in the project), by the time a frame is ready to be compressed by the DV codec, a lot of time has been 'wasted' on the single processor tasks. i am rendering a movie now to DV with some resizing, some text, the timecode plugin, and audio (no fx). it's getting 61%. i expect if i was recompressing DV footage with some color correction or something, that i'd get much higher, since most of the time would be spent on the SMP aware DV compression.

it's rare to see a video renderer utilize both processors. the only software on my pc that fully uses both is 3dsmax. i'm curious, have you tried rendering using different codecs in premiere and compared the processor utilization? which ones approach 100%?

search this forum on 'dual' and look at some of my posts if you want to see where the benefits of dual processors lie within Vegas.

- ben (cheesehole)

That was my biggest miff with 2.0. It actually did not use the typical dual power. One was basically idol. There claim that it supported dual was BS. Tech support ciould never explain how it utilized duals. It really made me mad because I bought the product based partly on that feature.

I was glad to see it used duals on this version. It maybe not using full potential. Maybe the next update SF can address that issue.

Your're absolutely right.

I rendered the same video using WMV 8 CODEC and both processors went up to 95%!!!

I also noticed that if a set the priority of the vegas30.exe process to "high" it usually renders the same project in about 3.5 minutes, while in the default setting ("normal") it takes like 5 minutes. Quite an improvement, but still not what I would expect.

to get similar render times to your other applications, you might want to try changing Vegas's render quality setting to preview or good instead of 'best' (assuming you have been testing with 'best').

search the forum for more information on that. you may not be able to detect the quality difference, but it will render faster.

>it's rare to see a video renderer utilize both processors.

I only have MSP and Premiere to compare it to. MSP is not SMP-aware and still renders DV much faster. P6 is, and uses ~85% cpu when rendering DV.

Clearly something wrong - it shouldn't take ~5 times longer. And I always use 'good' quality.

You're absolutely right.
I'm not using "Good" and it looks just the same and the rendering time has decreased considerably.

I also tried using "Preview" quality and man, I can't tell the difference, although the rendering time wasn't improved that much.

Thanks for your suggestion.

I am curious, when comparing rendering speeds for VV3 with MSP,what functions are you rendering?

I read that Vegas will use 100% of both cpu's if you render multiple sessions of vegas simultaeously.

I try to render something like a still or a pre-rendered color clip, duplicated twice, with a simple crossfade between them.

Yes, you can jigger VV3 into using both procs if you run two instances, but that isn't SMP.