[Curt Charles]

I can be done with track motion. I created a scrap book effect where we flew in to each image, watched a 10-second or so clip, then backed out to the page view. I created it by having each sub-clip it’s own self-contained 2-track M2T file, then had a master that contained the subordinate as separate tracks. The hard part was timing because I didn’t want a sub clip to start until we zoomed in to it.

Curt Charles
Lilywood Productions

[Curt Charles]

Thanks, Dieter, for the details and link on the file size computation. This is stuff I didn’t know.

We have a 2T disk (actually a pair of 2T set up in a RAID), so disk space really isn’t a concern at the present. We do have to expunge prior raw footage periodically, which makes B-roll rather job-specific.

Curt Charles
Lilywood Productions

[Curt Charles]

Shot in HDV (1440x1080i, compressed. Sony Z1 and A1 cameras which record to tape) and rendered to the same. The project is about 1 hour long and I don’t know its disk footprint.

We started a render and after about 20 hours stopped it; something was clearly amiss. We rebooted the computer and set Vegas’ priority to “High”. 10 and 1/2 hours later the render was done without a hitch.

We shot the next concert last night, this time with 3 cameras and 2 audio sources (plus 2 more for sync). We were very careful about ensuring the cameras were level; fixing a rotate problem in Vegas is possible, but will you ever pay for it!

Curt Charles
Lilywood Productions

[Curt Charles]

Thanks, Stephen.

We’re not a full-time production house, so the video PC is also the bill-paying PC, e-mail PC, still editing PC, etc. Perhaps we need to change that…

The PC has 3 disks: C: is for Windows, apps, office documents, e-mail PSTs, etc., D: is mostly for stills, and L: is a SATA RAID pair at 7200 RPM used exclusively for video. The RAID pair is configured for redundancy, not performance, and I’m clearly nowhere near disk bound. Is that what you mean by a dedicated video disk?

(I even have the machine on a UPS to ensure that nuisance dropouts don’t impact me.)

I’m confident that I could multitask on the machine but I’m very reluctant to interrupt Vegas while it’s working. It crashes enough without interruption. If others have had good luck, then I’m willing to give it a try.

I have noticed that all 8 threads run at about 70% load during renders, so it’s keeping the CPU very busy indeed.

Great suggestion on the priority setting; might just use that when we’re up against a deadline.

What scared us was seeing an estimate of 22 hours initially. It was still looking like 14 hours after working for 8, then quickly revised the estimate down to 11 hours. I guess the moral of the story here is don’t trust the estimate until the project is 30% rendered.

The rendered format is the same as the source format, but the 2nd video track is rotated and zoomed a touch. From what I’ve read here, those are culprits taking the time. I’ve done similar projects without the rotate and zoom and the render is usually less than 2.5X the running time, so the 11 hours for a 1 hour product was unsettling.

Would a high-power graphics card speed up the rotate/zoom? Our graphics card doesn’t have the horsepower to help.

Curt Charles
Lilywood Productions

[Curt Charles]

Thanks, Jeff and Stephen. I reset the preview RAM buffer to 0 but it made no difference – after 8 hours of rendering it still indicates 6 more hours are needed; I suspect the forecast is overly long.

Lesson learned: get it right during capture!

The project is a choir concert with a dozen songs. I think next time I’ll render each song independently, then hook them together in DVD architect.

Vegas really needs “suspend” and “resume” functions during rendering; at least that would allow checking e-mail.

Curt Charles
Lilywood Productions

[Curt Charles]

Thanks. I increased preview RAM to 8000 for this project, but forgot to reduce it prior to render. I’ll drop it to something tiny like 16 and re-render the project – there’s a small problem to fix, not worth an 11-hour render but certainly worth a 90-minute render.

So memory reserved for RAM preview isn’t available to the long “render” process?

Curt Charles
Lilywood Productions

[Curt Charles]

Thanks Mikhail and Steve.

According to Sony, upgrading to GeForce 570 might be able to give me a big boost, but my target formats are usually WMV or M2T in preparation for making an SD DVD, and Sony doesn’t offer benchmarks for those formats. I’d be happy with cutting my times in half; any chance?

Do you happen to know if DVD Architect benefits from GPU acceleration?

Curt Charles
Lilywood Productions

[Curt Charles]

I too have had this very frustrating problem. Previous projects would render fine, but the current project would always crash Vegas at apparently random spots. I made all sorts of project changes to try to resolve, but nothing seemed to really help.

I run an Intel i7 processor which is quad core. So naturally I had my render threads set to 4.

When I reset the render threads to 2 it completely resolved my crashing problem! What’s more, I didn’t notice any performance degradation and Windows tells me that 8 threads are still working in parallel.

Hope it works for you.

Curt Charles
Lilywood Productions