Avoid "best" in the render settings unless you are rescaling the video to another size. This alone will cause your render times to balloon by 3x or more with no benefit.

Any render in which you are scaling from HD to SD - "best" is worthwhile.

Renders of hirez stills on the timeline - maybe. It's worth testing with some short renders to see if there are visible improvements. Some recommend "best" for renders of stills, if you're rendering with "best" for an intermediate, and with best for a final render to MPEG2, that's a huge hit in rendering time, which benefits may not be visible in your final MPEG2.

Also look at the Cineform codec as a good alternative to AVI-Uncompressed. This codec is available in an AVI render, and is the codec used in the AVI HDV-Intermediate templates.

Usually, you don't select this option unless you have lots of unused capture in the project and are either moving the project to another computer or archivint it. It's just a method of collecting and trimming media that are used in the project.

Paul why don't you try dragging the "Nested VEG" files in where you want them and when your done, instead of rendering like that (the long way) try what Edward says and right click the VEG file - "edit it" and see if the nested files open the in full project. If it DOES reopen the nested VEG files in your current project (on the currently opened time line) then do that to all the nested files and then render it.

Basically you wont have to work messy just render messy.

Just an idea...

Oliver, i just tried your suggestion, i dragged 2 projects onto the timeline then right clicked>re-edit, first 1 project then the next, it just opened a seperate instance of vegas for each project, so no good, i need both opened projects to be on the same timeline.
Thanks anyway.

Paul.

Darn, I was hoping that worked.

I have read online that people "set their threads to 1 and memory to 128" or "Dynamic RAM to 0 and threads to 1" and that this helps a lot with render times, but I have no idea what they mean...

Another workflow trick that Oliver's post got me to thinking of:

Instead of nesting, for the render, "select all" the clips in a project and paste them into another project.

Pro - you can work section by section, nest to one project for previews.

Pro - no intermediate renders!

Pro - no nest-induced render hogging.

Con - track-based efx will not get copied and pasted over! This work needs to be done on the final "render version" of the project.

It's not worth it for a project that has lots of track efx, but for more straightforward cutting it's a great technique that we used to use before nesting became available.

Options > Prefs > Video.
The above options are at the top of this tab.

Thanks!

Do you use this method Mike, does it help?

I would only use this method *IF* you are having problems. I typically would not drop the ram to 0 but, instead, a very low number. Only if that did not work would I drop it to zero.

These changes have let some people successfully render projects that previously failed so it's worth a shot if your render is failing. The render will take longer, though. But if it finishes when it previously didn't, then it would be worth it for that project.

Does it effect the quality of the project in any way or is it just the render speed?

Not effect on quality. Just render speeds. Basically, you're telling Vegas to use one lawn mower to mow your yard instead of the four it normally uses so it will take longer to get your lawn mowed but it will still get mowed.