So I'm editing together a short film and I want to send one of the actors what I got so far and I'm right at the three minute mark. I out to render out as a MOV file at 1920X1080 HD, it's been rendering for 42 minutes all ready and it's stuck at 0%, the estimated time is at 17 hours and counting, I'm looking at my CPU and it's not moving, has it crashed or is really taking this long to render? How can I make this faster?

Hi Eduardo

You can shut it down cos it ain't gonna render!!! It happened to me once when there was an error during the edit and the render sat at 0%....something is not right with the setup..with me I had a volume slider set to infinity and amazingly enough that caused the render to halt!! (but nothing in the form of error messages!!)

What will the actor what your 3 min segment on???? computer??? If so maybe render it to something easy like MP4 and pop it onto YouTube ??? or just send the MP4 file.

Try a quick render using the Sony AVC render setting and choose the 1280x720 preset

Chris

I've tried a few different settings, same problem

Is this a new problem or are you new to Vegas? What has been your past rendering times?
Just wondering if it's an install problem.

I've been using vegas for years but I just upgraded to AVCHD from Mini DV so I'm not sure how to optomize vegas for the format

It might help if we had a few more details???

What camera are you creating the AVCHD on ??? What computer and which version of Vegas???

It could be a single problem above or all three!!! To give you an idea I shoot on Panasonic and the MTS files import nicely in Vegas 9 and rendering down to MPEG2 on my little DuoCore takes roughly 8 minutes per minute on footage on the timeline....if you do the same with the HD file transcoded to DV-AVI it will render a 5 minutes clip in about 2 minutes where the MTS file takes nearly an hour!!

List some specs and I'm sure someone can help!!

Chris

It's a sony HDR XR500

The computer is a custom build

2.4 GHZ Quad Core processor
4 Gigs DDR2 Rams
500 GB SATA HDD
640 MB VRAM
Windows 7 64-Bit

Running Vegas 9.0 64- bit

I'm rendering the clips independantly to MOV files (3 MBPS) and I'll render back out to MTS when it's all finished, hope that'll work

Why are you rendering to MOV?

What's your Dynamic RAM preview memory set to?

3 Gigs

And I honestly have no reason why I chose MOV I just did

Change dynamic RAM preview to something low, such as 350MB, which is the default for Vegas 8.1. That will probably fix your problem. Also, the default number of rendering threads is 16.

And I honestly have no reason why I chose MOV I just did

If you're sending the actor something for review purposes, use the "Internet 16:9 HD 30p" Template found under the "Sony AVC (*.mp4, *.m2ts, *.avc) Save as type".
Customize it as desired.
Quality is excellent, the file size is small and the render should be pretty quick.

Note: this render template is available in Pro 9 only.

Here's a screenshot of what I was talking about.

Just throwing this out there, it's unlikely the cause of the problem, but how many effects do you have applied to the clip?

Some times when Vegas reaches the point in a clip with a large effect/amount of effects it will slow down drastically and temporarily display a misleading render time, usually tripled or more, until the effect is rendered and the ETA returns to normal.

Change dynamic RAM preview to something low, such as 350MB, which is the default for Vegas 8.1. That will probably fix your problem. Also, the default number of rendering threads is 16.

It Worked!!!!!!!!

Thank you and thank everyone for your help!

I'm thinking there needs to be a sticky to tell people to STOP changing this setting to high amounts. Even though Vegas warns the user, people change it and then have issues then turn around and bring the issue to us and after we try to solve the issue it turns out it was the user's own careless changing of the RAM preview amount. Please people, changing the ram preview amount does not improve the preview performance.

Agree with Jeff!

An excellent suggestion guys!!
Stickies are a job for Edward Troxel, our trusted and respected moderator.

I've put a few stickies up at the top but it doesn't seem people read them. Perhaps I should add a new one there titled something like "I'm having a problem in Vegas, what should I try?" Give me a thought on the title and then we can start filling it in with common questions and solutions.

I also think the sticky is a great idea. I like the title you suggested or something similar. "Problems with Vegas? Check Here First!" might be good.

It would be great if there could be categories such as render, color correction, titler but maybe this would be difficult to manage.

Thanks Edward.

I've started a new sticky and seeded it with three initial entries. If you want to send me some common issues and have me fill them in, I can do so. If you want to add more entries yourself, feel free to do so but I may edit them.

Thanks Ed! Looks like a nice start to a very informative topic.

I would like to keep that thread a list of problems and solutions. If you have a problem you'd like added, feel free to add one to that thread or contact me and I'll see about adding it.