Any real-time rendering solutions for Vegas?

jonathanroth wrote on 5/25/2004, 10:09 PM

I'm a television producer who has recently, in the last year, gotten into producing small-budget promo videos. I had been using Vegas Audio for years and gave Vegas Video a shot and have been SUPER impressed with its features over Premiere, Edius, etc. After using it for a year, however, I have come to the conclusion that no matter how good a program it may be, I can't continue to rely on it due to the HORRENDOUS render times. I recently put together a 15 minute video that mostly consisted of photos zooming in and out...3 and a half hours to render!!! (Athlon 2200 CPU, 1 gig of RAM, etc) Now, this is pretty much the last straw. I just can't afford to sit around and wait for something to render this long. Does anyone know of a real-time rendering solution for Vegas? Today, I went to check out the Canopus real-time rendering solution...and although I think Edius and Premiere suck, I might just go that route, to save time. However, I really don't want to if I don't have to. Does anyone have any advice????? I love Vegas....I just want it to render in real-time (or close to real-time)!

Thanks!

Comments

Spot|DSE wrote on 5/26/2004, 12:00 AM

Nope. Renders are renders. No hardware at this time for Vegas. And even with the Canopus/Premiere solution, start adding blur, or other spatial processes. You'll see render times climb as well. Granted, not to the level that you're working with in Vegas, but then again, it's more a situation of learning what to avoid for best results in Vegas. For instance, were your images tif files? If so, Vegas must call for an external reader and that slows the process by a fair bit.

kameronj wrote on 5/26/2004, 3:56 AM

Yes I agree with Spot. Renders are renders.

Although Vegas is the bestest application for NLE - I wouldn't even think to begin to use it in a 'real world' time sensitive manner (like television production).

And, also like with that which Spot said previously to me, depending on what you are rendering (tiffs, etc) render times will vary accordingly....even on PCs pumped up on steroids.

TheHappyFriar wrote on 5/26/2004, 6:31 AM

If you upgrade your CPU, MB, & RAM to a 333mhz+ buss, that will help lower render times. With Premiere 6, 1ghz Athlon (100mhz bus), & ` hour DV footage, it took me about 5-6 hours to render that to mpeg-1. With Vegas, AMD 2500 (333mhz buss), & 1 hours of MPG-2 footage, it took me ~56 minuts to convert to mpeg-1 :)

Also, i'd recomend the pic's be PNG's, & unless you're going to zoom in on them at all, keep them around DV resolution.

Also, I don't think any "cheap" RT solution will to pan/crop on pictures (you're talking more then a Matrox RT most likely, which will add up to $5,000+).

Lanzaedit wrote on 5/26/2004, 6:47 AM

jonathanroth wrote:
<<I have come to the conclusion that no matter how good a program it may be, I can't continue to rely on it due to the HORRENDOUS render times.>>

And I believe this is the primary reason Vegas will remain out of the elite group of NLE's.

John

farss wrote on 5/26/2004, 7:46 AM

This has got to be one of the silliest topics that keeps coming up, SPOT was probably trying to be polite but lets just face the facts. There is NO such thing as real time rendering. The statement is plain stupid as its totally unqualified. Real time rendering of WHAT may I ask?
Not even systems costing millions can render some quite common Vegas projects in real time, sure I've seen systems that do specific tasks in better than real time. They're designed from the ground up using purpose built hardware to fill a specific need.
If Vegas was ever built along the same lines 90% of us would be out of here period. All of the true real time systems have brick wall limitations on everything, once you hit them the only way forward is to PTT and then start again and then the whole real time thing becomes a joke. Thats why a lot of tasks are pulled off those magic real time systems into non realtime systems because overall the job gets done quicker.
At the end of the day there's no one shoe fits all editing system, if your can live with the limitations of systems like Edius then I'd say go for it, nothing wrong with having both.

<end of rant>

Bob.

Spot|DSE wrote on 5/26/2004, 7:52 AM

Nah....Premiere, AE, Storm, Rexedit, all do this with either internal tools, imaginate, or Stage tools.
Premiere/Stagetools, Storm/Imaginate are both real time pan/crop.

Use TGA for color-critical images, not png. PNG has color shift at certain saturations and hues. Don't know why.

thrillcat wrote on 5/26/2004, 8:44 AM

Question...you said you were zooming in and out of stills. Did you use track motion or pan & crop to zoom in and out? I've found pan & crop renders much much faster than track motion...

johnmeyer wrote on 5/26/2004, 9:08 AM

If you want to speed up rendering, Vegas 5.0 does include Network Rendering. The first implementation is a kludge, and has many rough edges and bugs. However, once you get it running, it can reduce your rendering times. If Sony fixes some of the rough edges, and takes a few of the suggestions regarding stitching the final pieces together, I think you might find that if you have a few spare PCs lying around that you could cut rendering times from your three hours down to under an hour.