Hi Adam
I have a YouTube channel called TemporalParadox1 (specialising in Vegas Movie Studio) where I have uploaded video tutorials showing how to set up a project and render to what ever template you need.
The best template to use to get the fastest rendering times is Sony AVC .mp4.
When you “customise” this template, you can select to use GPU Acceleration or the CPU for Rendering Only.
Try both settings, to find out which performs best on your machine.
Windows Media Video (.wmv) encoding is a lot more CPU intensive than using Sony AVC/AAC .mp4.
Remember also that Vegas Movie Studio is only a 32bit program, so even though you now have a 64 bit machine with lots of RAM, this is not all accessible using VMS. This is where Vegas Pro 64 bit makes a big difference.
On your computer setup, I would strongly encourage you to add a 2nd Hard Disc Drive. So one HDD stores your source video files, and the other HDD can store all the projects & videos being created by Vegas. This setup will speed up your processing times, because at the moment you have one HDD reading and writing at the same time. When you have TWO drives, one can be dedicated to reading only and the other to writing only.
My PC Specs:
CPU: Intel i7-2600k @ 4.6 GHz
GPU: Nvidia GTX460
RAM: 16GB Corsair Vengeance
Boot Drive: 120GB Solid State Drive
Storage: 2 x 1TB Hard Disc Drive
Sound Card: Creative Soundblaster X-Fi Titanium