I've rendered videos up to 96 minutes in length, on several occasions, and never had any crashes. (Counting my blessings!)

J--

If you value the time that it took to create your masterpiece, then back up the heck out of it.

First thing you might want to do is make an avi of the finished project, and put it out on miniDV tape. Then you'll still have it if your disk drive suddenly heads south.

On the longer videos I edit, I always break them up into segments and stitch the segments back together. There are several advantages to doing this:

1-if you have more than one PC, you can render each segment on a different machine...nothing like virtual multi-processing for render time optimization

2-If one segment takes a dump, all is not lost

3-editing each segment is MUCH easier working with smaller pieces.

Rendering in segments is definitely the way to go. This is the way the pros in any field do it. For instance, I used to head up a tech doc group. The user manuals were often several hundred pages. We never loaded up the whole book and pressed the "print" button. Instead, we printed one chapter at a time. Even with that, the printer would still jam, usually on the second pass (we were, of course, printing on both sides, and had to duplex manually). By printing one chapter at a time, if the result became unusable, we only lost twenty pages instead of two hundred.

The same thing is true in programming: You create and compile small segments of code, testing each as you go. At the end, you merge the segments together.

Sony could help tremendously here. Video projects should also be broken into small segments and rendered separately. Such a workflow makes it easier to create, archive, and render. At the end of the process, where you print to tape, or create a DVD, you can assemble these parts and create the final output. I have heard rumors that DVD Architect will be improved in the next release. I ferverently hope that this includes the ability to seemlessly merge multiple MPEG files into a DVD that plays continuously from one MPEG to the next. I have asked for this many times over the past year and have provided this same justification each time. I hope they listen, because it will help you in what you want to do.

In the meantime, you can still render each section of your project to separate MPEGs, and then use Womble's MPEG Wizard to merge them together prior to putting them into DVDA.

I just read in another thread that the announcement is less than a week away.

Noah,
I'm a novice but have rendered many projects both short (10-15 min) and long (95 minutes). My first render is generally to DV (.avi), then to MPEG-2 for DVD NTSC. I never segment renders and have had no problems with losing anything. One thing you could consider doing before rendering is to save your project with all media by hitting save as and then checking the little box that says retain media (lower left) so that you have a back-up of your project and all media in case something happens (use a new name of course). I use this feature to archive/back-up important projects, usually saving it to a data DVD (if it will fit) for safety in case the hard drive dies. I guess I'm so used to Vegas being rock solid that I don't worry much about rendering crashes. I've never had one. Hope this helps.
Randy