I have a project with three nested events on the timeline. It takes over 15 minutes for an event 2h4m, long ties up the screen, and barely uses the CPU. I wish it would crank up both CPU's for 15 seconds and get it over with.

is this normal? Any way to speed it up or make it on-demand as opposed to automatic?

I'm running a CoreDuo 3.2GHz with 2GB of ram. Raw files are on an internal SATA drive. The veggie is on the same drive, but i render to a different internal SATA drive.

Any thoughts?

I noticed rendering time going up exponentially when i nested veg files in veg files. My CPU is more anemic that yours.

My previous method was to pre-render animated supers as 1080 progressive (working with HDV here) and drop the rendered M2T file in lieu of the nested VEG. Rendered the 1:13 duration program a lot faster. But I ran into some corruption, documented here:

http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?t=117196&highlight=crash

As I was under the gun, I continued with nested VEGgies, but I am going back to this prerendered workflow when I get some time to work the issues out.

I really like having two instances of vegas, one rendering the super and the main project in the other, great flexibility if I don't like the effect, I can just go back and fix it quickly.

I used to use nested projects, but for the exact same reasons listed above (the vid0 render) I went back to using 1 project file. Granted, my most recent project (a two camera wedding movie) had 38 tracks (video & audio - due to bus level audio cleanign effects in real time, some clips needed their own track which greatly expanded the number of tracks).

The project is a monster to open, but a 3GHz P4 HT with 2.5GB of RAM does the trick just fine.