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Activity Forums VEGAS Pro Ways to increase speed up print to tape?

  • Ways to increase speed up print to tape?

    Posted by Roger Matthews on May 14, 2005 at 4:17 pm

    I have just started using Vegas and have been very pleased with it.

    However, I am very confused as to why it is taking so long for me to print to tape! I am using Vegas 6 on a Pentium 4 2.0Aghz CPU with 512mb RAM and a dedicated 250gb hard drive for the video. My project is 24p Widescreen with some short clips of 30p and 30i thrown in (very small amounts). My time line is five minutes.

    First I rendered the timeline to a new video track, and that alone took twenty minutes, despite 95% of the footage being a 1:1 copy. Unless I have made a dumb mistake, I have not applied any effects of any kind.

    Finally Vegas lets me print to tape after doing this, but now the print to tape’s estimated time of completion is in about an hour! I am converting the 24p widescreen to standard letterboxed NTSC for playback on my 4:3 SD TV, but I don’t see why this should take that long! If a mediocre program such as Premiere 6.5 could export to tape in realtime, I figure I must be missing something very simple.

    Chris Borjis replied 21 years ago 6 Members · 7 Replies
  • 7 Replies
  • Galt

    May 14, 2005 at 7:12 pm

    My guess would be that since your project is in 24p, it has to do the 2:3 pulldown as it prints to tape. Rendering every 1/2 frame takes a while….

  • Roger Matthews

    May 14, 2005 at 11:42 pm

    I suppose that could be part of it.

    At least for now I’ve found if I print to tape with just “Good” quality instead of “Best”, I cut down rendering time in gigantic amounts. And the quality on my 30″ TV seems pretty much the same as the original footage.

  • Byron T. taylor

    May 15, 2005 at 3:05 am

    The only time you ever need “best” is when doing frame rate conversions, or when using higher than 720×480 source material.

    Vegas is very slow at rendering. In your case — changing a widescreen project to 4:3 is a re-render of the entire project.

    Other softwares can take the same file and send to tape without any rendering. I often use Vegas to render out single files, then print to tape using something else. I’ve never understood why Vegas still does the whole render to W64 audio of the whole project before a print to tape.

    Let’s hope that Vegas begins to catch up with their competitors in this area. Print to tape and Text Creation are very, very weak. Maybe these will someday get the depth of the rest of this program. Until then — we just have to deal with excruciatingly long renders.

    Byron Taylor

  • Liam Kennedy

    May 15, 2005 at 6:34 am

    It only renders those W64 files if you do a PTT from the timeline (and it doesn’t take all that long to do that anyway). If you do your PTT from within the VidCap program it does not render the W64 files and directly outputs whatever DV AVI files you tell it to.

  • Stephen Mann

    May 16, 2005 at 5:31 am

    You can have quality or you can have speed. I’ll match the vegas-rendered video quality against any Premiere or Pinnacle render any day.

    Steve Mann

  • Roger Matthews

    May 16, 2005 at 6:45 am

    While I don’t doubt the quality of Vegas, is there really a difference in quality when just spitting back footage? When I’m talking about rendering I don’t mean anything like color correction or anything fancy – the maximum manipulation I’m doing for now is converting 16:9 to letterboxed standard 4:3 NTSC.

    I am not informed enough to know, but I’d guess that that sort of thing would be hard to mess up, no? Premiere would seem to give me pretty exact renderings of my original footage.

  • Chris Borjis

    May 16, 2005 at 5:36 pm

    I think steve is talking about rendering again to DV which
    is highly compressed and to be avoided whenever possible.

    Make a text screen, render it to DV and look at how ugly
    it can get. With the codec Vegas uses, it doesn’t look as bad.

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