Interesting. Are the results the same with external encoder or are they about the same?

I haven't done any comparison testing but offhand I'd say they look the same. Rendering with V4 did seem faster though, but that might just be because I'm used to the Vegas interface.

Comparing to MPEG-2, was your WM9 rendering taking much longer?

What were your settings for WM9 render?

I could not seem to be able to render a problem free WM9 clip. In all cases, the rendering took an awfully long time (2 or 3 times longer than doing so to MPEG-2). The resulted .WMV file could not play smoothly.

--svb

Not sure about the others but I use default settings for 100, 256 and 512 kps then use "custom" in the video tab to maintain aspect ratio. Vegas is very quick compared to Micrsoft's free Windows Media Encoder and light months ahead of Cleaner 5 or Canopus Procoder. Quality is excellent. The oil company I work (producing 25% of Canada's daily domestic consumption) for has endorsed Media 9 as the corporate standard.

Peter

I always render down to WMV9 - especially for stuff I want to have streamed from my website.

Alls I know is it works for me.

I was having a little problem with some of the lower settings (below 512) clipping the audio...but then again, I think it was just my media player. My WinAmp has been acting up lately....so I only view video using Microsoft Media Player now.

Other than that - I get pretty good render times (depending on the size of the file, that is). Nothing to out of the ordinary and nothing I can't live with for now.

Hope this helps a bit.

Thank you (pb, kameronj) for your responses. I should be all set. Stupid me using the default settings (rendering to 1280x720, 30fps, etc.) which was why it took so long and the rendered clip could not be played back reasonably well on my humbly configured system.

--svb