Rendering Question
 

I am doing a very long project in Vegas right now (a business seminar).
It is about 1h 40min long. It has a lot of transitions in it between the speaker and the powerpoint file (which I converted to avi using camstudio).
It is taking a tremedous amount of time to render to MPEG2 format. (left it on overnight and woke up this morning and it says 8 hours estimated time left after roughly 7 hours of rendering last night) Quality settings was set to Good.

Is there anyway I can speed this process up? (pre-render some transitions maybe?)

Any suggestions? or is this normal for a project like this?

Thanks

It really depends on your system specs and the type of effects you used.

The length of your edit isn't abnormaly long. With my old Athlon 900mz system, it would take 12 to 20 + hours to cook. If you have any global effects (effects that you apply over large expanses of the video, blurs, lighting etc. . .) really take a lot of time.

Another time saver is to drop the transitions - remember, the cut is the most dynamic transition of all.

Other than beef up your system, try saving your rendered output file to a disk that's different from the source material. Also, defrag your disks. Also also, sometimes, virus scanning software
will check programs and hog CPU time, so consider turning it off for a bit. Also, check your memory usage to see if you're close to full with Windows Task Monitor.

Another thing you may try that may help speed things up is to render FIRST to DV-AVI, load that new file in a new project, and then render that to MPEG2. Amazingly enough, that combination can actually be faster than a straight to MPEG2 render.

Pre-renders will not help a render to MPEG2.

<<<-- Originally posted by Edward Troxel : Another thing you may try that may help speed things up is to render FIRST to DV-AVI, load that new file in a new project, and then render that to MPEG2. Amazingly enough, that combination can actually be faster than a straight to MPEG2 render. -->>>

Will I lose any quality with this approach?

<<<-- Originally posted by Jeff Toogood : Will I lose any quality with this approach? -->>>

No you will not.

Ok, I tried rendering to DV-AVI and started the process last night before going to bed (11:00pm) and when I woke up this morning (7:00am), it was at 40% complete estimating 11 hours remaining!!

My system specs are as follows:

P4 2.4GHZ 533 FSB
1024 PC2100 DDR Ram
Source HD: 160 GB 7200RPM Maxtor
Target HD: 120 GB 7200RPM Seagate
O/S HD: 80 GB 7200 RPM Western Digital

The Maxtor drive is on a PCI controller card (not sure if that matters) and the Western Digital & Seagate both have DMA enabled.

I don't have any processes running in the background and I double checked that my anti-virus was disabled.

Is this normal? or do you think my computer has a problem somewhere?

The reason I am concerned is because in the past I have rendered 2 hour long clips to MPEG2 in about 6 hours or so (albeit with hardly any transistions). Are the transistion the key to the long rendering process?

Taking that long just to go to DV AVI?! Your footage must be *FULL* of effects and transitions- that's the only way it would normally take that long.
With a 1 hour wedding video (including lots of effects, soft focus, slow motion, etc) it goes right from timeline to MP2 in roughly 2:1 time. In other words a 1 hour program takes 2 hours to render out to MP2.

My Specs:
P4 3.0ghz 800mhz FSB
XP home
1 gig of dual channel PC3200 ram
3 120gig Maxtor Diamond plus9 SATA drives
Asus P4C800E mobo

Usually footage going straight from DV AVI to MP2 without any transitions or effects is realtime if not slightly faster.
Check your track headers make sure there are no accidental opacity changes. Sometimes you can bump the opacity on the track inadvertantly and move it to 99% which is not visible yet causes major renduring throughout the ENTIRE project. Worth a shot- good luck.

Jeff, can you send me your VEG file? I'd like to see if you have something set that shouldn't be. Transitions will affect times some but not to the extent you are seeing.

Edward,

Isn't DV-AVI a compressed format at 25 mbits/sec ? If so, quality would be lost in the additional jpeg-like compression.

Yeah but don't you capture from the camera DV AVI from the start.

Jeff,

You said you converted the PowerPoint to AVI with Cam studio.
What is the resolution of this file? If it is bigger tha 720 x 480, then THAT is what is taking so long to render.

Gary

Yes it was captured at a resolution of 800x600

I don't think I can capture at 720x480

Edward, I will email you my veg file