Think about what you said in your post. You said that the quality of your work is suffering in order to keep up.

Since you are a regular here you know you need either a Quad-core or i7, since those are the fastest and most cost effective options today.

5 hour rendering times doesn't even make sense unless you are using MB, etc.

well I upgraded from a 5 year old ( but very high end gaming PC) pentium to a new HP quad core. I use Vegas and the difference in rendering time in amazing. Rendering time is virtually a non issue now. I also break my projects up as others have stated to smaller intermediate files. It seems I rarely have more than 30 minute renders now which is very manageable.

Art

Yes, I am aware of hardware. I suppose I should rename the thread with "whine & complain" in the title. :-)

The part of the post where I am solociting input is the "what is your delay tolerance before you decided to change hardware or work flow? And what did you change?" I asked that in order to figure out what delays people were willing to have before realizing a change is needed.

I think I have two options. Buy a faster box/components, or do something else on the project's critical path. I do the latter on another machine. Works for me.

If you're getting constantly pushed up to your deadline's last minute you might want to re-budget the time required in your jobs. You may be underestimating the true time requirements a bit.

I think we all wrestle with workflow optimization. If you find the magic bullet, I'm all ears.

I hardly ever see how long it takes to render. Most of the time I have it run when I leave for the day. And since I work at home, leaving for the day means just walking out of the room. If I'm still awake, every now and then I'll check in on it just to make sure it didn't freeze, or have an error. Since I run it over night, it's always done when I get up. If I do set it to render during the day, then I work on the DVD artwork, go to lunch, watch TV...etc.

Good Gawd, where am I going wrong then. I have a Quad Core machine with Raptor drives in Raid etc etc etc and tend to use a reasonable amount of Colour correcting. My average Blu Ray author time is 11.5hrs!!!!!!!!

Thats been the driving factor behine me upgrading to a new i& machine (just arrived!)