Workflow/render question

RoyBU wrote on 3/11/2008, 7:30 PM
I have two videos, one of a dress rehearsal for a play and the other of the performance. So the two videos are almost exactly the same length (about 90 minutes), but the performance video is a bit more complicated, with more cuts.

The performance video I rendered directly to mpg in Vegas, including a reduction in size to bring it a little closer to the TV-safe frame. This took about 30 hours on my dual-core Opteron system. Then just out of curiosity I rendered the dress rehearsal video to avi (uncompressed), including the same reduction in size, which took about 6 hours, and then rendered that avi to mpg with no more editing changes, which took about 5 hours. The dress rehearsal was rendered on a different machine, but that machine is also a dual-core Opteron (same CPU).

So is the large difference in render times at least partly due to the difference in render workflow? I certainly don't claim the projects are exactly the same, but I don't see how the minor differences in cuts and color correction could add up to 18 or 19 hours. Is it faster to render to avi first, then to mpg? That hasn't been my experience in the past.

Comments

QueenGeek wrote on 3/12/2008, 4:46 AM
There are other folks here much more knowledgeable about Vegas's performance in rendering than am I... but it seems to me that render time is completely dependent on what *else* you might be running (aware or not) on the rendering computer and other factors such as available memory, disk speed, how full your disk is, etc. I would take the two projects, swap them, and render each on the opposite computer to rule out other factors. Then I would compare results. If each of the projects takes approximately the same time regardless of which computer it is on, then the work flow differences are likely an important factor.
farss wrote on 3/12/2008, 5:28 AM
Adding an FX such as color correction will increase render times.
Rendering to DV first and then to mpeg-2 should be slightly slower than rendering directly to mpeg-2.
Be aware however that rendering to DV first and then to mpeg-2 will cause a quality hit for graphics such as text, you'll notice the hit far more if you're working in NTSC than PAL.

Bob.