Updated to 9, and now render times are off the chart.
 

Long story short... I've been tasked to splice together 3 clips. Open Title credits, 5 min film @ 720p, and closing credits. (total running time of 7min).

I crossed faded about 2-3 seconds of both the open title credits and closing credits with the main film.... no fx at all.

My counter is STILL climbing at 36min for this. (EDIT it JUST finished) What could be wrong?

I'm on a quad core box on Win7RC1, so my box isn't a slouch.

I used to be able to splice clips together and it'd render in 30 seconds in Vegas 8 as long as I didn't have any FX on.

Please help!

What are your project settings?
What format are the credits in?

Here's the info you asked for...

Project Settings
Template: HDV 720-24P
1280x720
Frame Rate: 23.976 (IVTC Film)
Full Resolution Rendering Quality - Good
Adjust source media to better match. Checked
Audio
Sample Rate: 48k/24bit

Main Video:
Apple ProRes
1280x720x24
Frame Rate: 23.976 (IVTC Film)

Credit Videos:
H264
720x480x32
Frame Rate: 29.970 (NTSC)

Well, you're transcoding a ProRes .mov file into HDV. You're transcoding a 29.97 file into 24p, and transcoding 720x480 into 1280x720.

Yea, that's gonna take a while in 9.0, 8.0 or any other editor.

I was under the impression that ProRes was HDV

Your impression is incorrect. By a long shot.

For the benefit of the newbies, care to elaborate?

Ben

In short HDV was developed to allow small consumer cameras record an HD signal onto a miniDV tape. Massive compromises in quality were required to do that. Some broadcasters regard HDV materials as SD.

ProRes is at the opposite end of the spectrum. It is a codec built primarily to edit high end HD material destined for film or television.

Complete opposite ends of the HD quality spectrum.

Further to Perrone's contribution:
HDV is MPEG-2 Long GOP
ProRes is Intraframe compressed

Which translates to : HDV uses a Group Of Pictures ranging from 6 to 15 frames and compresses video data based on changes in the image between "keyframes" or full frames. This requires significant computing horsepower as each frame needs to be "uncompressed" on the fly based on frames that have come before it AND after it.

ProRes compression is done all within one frame, much as DV compression is, allowing for SIGNIFICANTLY better performance, albeit at much larger file sizes.

And Shaun didn't even mention the issues of color space, or 1440x1080 pixels... etc.

And... ProRes decoding on the PC is done by Quicktime. While this does work, the implementation as Vegas sees it is rather slow.

ProRes is a great format - kudos to Apple for finally making it available on the PC via QT.

Vegas, OTOH, has had lots of development attention in optimizing playback/rendering for DV; then, later, HDV; most recently AVCHD, because these are the acquisition formats of the masses.

Understood. So for the future, if I'm working in Vegas, and I receive a ProRes video, should I convert it to a certain format before working in it?

Not necessarily. Just understand that results won't be instant.

Well, what would YOU do if you only had access to Vegas to splice clips?

1. Set Vegas project to 1280x720 square pixels.
2. Set project rendering to "Best"
3. Load main video(s)
4. Create titles at 720/24p and not upres 720x480
5. Export 720p finished master