Personally I'd swap 2 & 3 if you are talking the SYSTEM bus here
(not IDE bus like UATA 133 etc.). Faster CPU is the main thing
indeed for faster rendering times and more responsive environment.

VCD is quite good for those things indeed Don! I must say I have
a bit better track record with SVCD. Although I haven't send out
lots of discs to different people I have tested my last movie on
at least 5 players with no problems at all (one player is known
to have problems with some SVCD's). Most have the players
DID require me to hit the PLAY button explicitly for some reason.
(when you insert a DVD it plays it automatically).

Most players recognized the disc by showing SVCD on the screen
and then just waiting for me hitting play. Weird.

Also with a VCD or SVCD you can add menu's. I've never tried
this myself though.

Then I probably should have encoded to AC-3 from the start. I specifically chose WAV beings the program (even at 7mb/s) isn't in danger of filling the DVD.

If you gave it a WAV file and you told it to use PCM audio then I'm sure the audio was not encoded. However, it does take time to build the VOB files and any other background things. I think you are fine.

I wasn't trying to put them into any particular order - just listed them as I thought of them.

Here is a comparison: I have a desktop PIII 750MHz with 256 Meg RAM and 7200 RPM drive and a laptop PIV 2.8GHz with 1Gig RAM and 5400 RPM drive. I honestly don't know the bus speeds but imagine the laptop is faster. I also have a weekly program I edit that is very consistent from week to week.

Doing a PTT of this project on the desktop takes about 50 - 55 minutes in rendering time before the countdown screen. The PTT on the laptop took 15 - 20 minutes for the same task. This was expected.

However, if you do a full Render AS of the hour long project the timings get more interesting. The desktop unit will get done FASTER than the laptop because all of the unedited areas must be copied (which is the majority of the program) and the desktop unit does that MUCH faster.

Moral of the story? It's a combination of things that determines the final rendering speed to take all things into consideration. However, RAM is minimal in this equation.

Transition effect I'm looking for....
 

I've been watching alot of peoples wedding videography work and there is one transition that I really like and believe it is on the FCP platform. It's like a blur/dislove/morph. Clip A blurs out and, for lack of better description, "morphs" into a blurred clip B then comes back into focus. Does Vegas have anything to simulate this effect other than manually setting keyframes to a guassian blur? What about the morph part- I'm assuming it can't do that.

Actually, if you want TRUE morphing check out WinMorph at http://www.debugmode.com. Satish has WinMorph, Plug-n-pac, and Frameserver available for Vegas.

However, if you look on the transitions tab, click on Cross Effect, what about the Cross Blur A/B transition?

I see your point Edward.... CPU & harddisk then. <g>

Bella's DV Keyboard with Toggle Control
 

Has anyone looked into Bella’s DV Keyboard with the Vegas sticker set?

If you setup an autorun.ini file on your VCD then you can get it to automatically play with Windows Media Player on win95 systems and up. Search dvdrhelp.com on how to do this.

VCD is probably the most compatible.

Compression question?
 

When you render to a new track, and use that avi, instead of the original material, does it lose quality when the whole project is rendered out?

No

See I really should do more research before I start blurting out questions- thanks again Edward! Going to check it out today as soon as I get off from work. TGIF!

As long as the rendering was done at full quality right? You don't want to use a medium quality render as your source.

Thanks guys. I didn't think so but wanted to be sure.