In your case, A bit more RAM would probably speed things up a bit.

Of course a faster processor would also help.

The thing is, any effects, crossfades, filters, etc. that you add will increase the render time.

Also, rendering as something other than AVI will increase the render time, etc. etc. etc.

My suggestion is to finish your project, and let it render while you are out and about, or sleeping.

I Have a P3-600 with 384MB of RAM, and yeah, it takes a while to render, but it does happen. Do like EArrigotti suggests, set it up, get it started and let it happen when you're in dreamland

I had posted a few weeks ago about a really neat utility called RAMpage that monitors just how much of your ram is in use. That post is in this thread:

http://www.sonicfoundry.com/forums/ShowMessage.asp?ForumID=4&MessageID=105100

Also,there was a fascinating thread a few days ago about a situation where it seemed to be taking forever to render. Turns out the user had accidentally moved the "Opacity" line down a tiny bit, but as a result VV had to re-render every single frame!

RAM has little effect on rendering times. The faster your CPU, the quicker the render. Heavy use of FX filters, changing the frame size from what the source file was, lots of tracks, those kind of things all impact on rendering time as you would expect.

If you have a single PC, there is nothing stopping you from using it for others tasks, while you render. For sure it will slow the rendering down some, but will not cause dropped frames or other problems. Even on a very slow machine like my old dog, a PII 400 it will eventuality get done, but not anywhere near as fast as my XP 1900+.

Mission critical is capturing/burning to disk/printing to tape. For that you should be doing nothing else and also be using a dedicated drive to capture to. Of course you also disabled any screen saver, anti-virus, anything that may be running in the backgroud so the CPU don't get sidetracked even for a couple seconds which may result in dropped frames.

Would be be any use in an instance, say, when you are happy with a section pre-rendering that part?

If you edited something prior to that but that didn't result in a move up or down the timeline would VV3 still have to re-render?

I'm not a big fan of pre-rendering. If at some point you're going to render from the timeline (I don't, preferring traditional last step rendering then using the created file) you'll have to do it at some point. Vegas Video will drone on and on if you have a complex project and make a large number of temp files. You'll see a green bar added to indicate which events got pre rendered.

If I understand correctly if you add anything to the timeline afterwards prior to printing to tape for example Vegas will render the whole thing again anyway making any pre-rendering a waste of your time. Am I correct this is what happens?

One useful feature of pre rendering is you get a higher quality preview. Again, to me it isn't really necessary.

Take some time, and learn what filters/track effects seem to hog the computer. Just load a clip, create a loop, switch between filters, watch the Fps count at the bottom of the preview window. Things like like light rays ( & 1/2 the other FX) and track motion/glow can really bog down you renders. For areas that need these heavy effects, treat it as a sub project and render it while you work on another part of the master project. This is the best we get until BG rendering.
Only use the stock DV template. Best quality under custom settings is only needed for stuff your going to re-size for net dist..
Craig H.

Here's a horribly entertaining idea. How about somebody create a VV3 "benchmark" That just uses built in media generators and filters, and renders to a format everybody has, and then post it somewhere. I'd be interested to see a few comparason times...