K5000 posted:I also have a raw edit of Portland ready on Vegas. Could you tell which codecs you used to render? I was wondering which one would be fast and still give a good quality? I hear Vegas isn't the fastest editing program when rendering and this would seem to ring true, at least on my poor old Athlon 64 X2 4200+ - some test runs on shorter clips would seem to put the total rendering time at somewhere close to 26 hours (this on the MPEG-2 codec). And that's a bit too much, considering I'm rendering from my external 1 TB drive which I often need at school as well.
I can tell you what I did, but I can't say that what I did was particularly smart... rendering is so slow that I didn't do a lot of investiating, I just tried something, and it seemed to work. (Though not as slow as for you; I think each part rendered in about 4 hours on my computer.)
Short answer: I'd recommend using XviD.
Long answer:
In general, the Mpeg4 family of codecs are going to give you much better compression than Mpeg2 codecs. Included in the Mpeg4 family are H.264, Mpeg4, DivX, and XviD.
For part 1 and part 3, I used the DivX codec to compress the video (I left the audio uncompressed) because the drop-down seemed to imply it would actually use all 4 of the cores in my CPU, and it was unclear whether the others would. I set the quality setting very high -- 18Mbps -- and then took the output file from that process and recompressed it with ffmpeg for the released files using XviD, which is the compressor I generally prefer.
For part 2, I tried the DivX thing, but it didn't work right; I could play back the rendered file just fine, but ffmpeg couldn't convert it properly (this was where the bad part-2-version-1 with the missing section came from), so presumably the DivX codec output some data that was slightly wrong. So in the end I re-rendered it using XviD.
If the render is going to take longer than you can manage, you might want to try splitting the rendering into a couple of pieces. The render dialog gives you the option to only edit the loop/selection region, so you could select, say, the first third or fourth of the file and render that, then the next piece, etc.
Another thing is that the compression goes slower the larger the output resolution is; so you can render out a 800x450 faster than you can render 1280x720 faster than you can render 1920x1280.
Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 02/02/2009 09:26AM by nothings.
thanks very much 
