May be so but I used it to que renders and overcome some other issues.
I want the feature back!

There have been several threads on network rendering, and everyone says that it was eliminated because multiple core computers make it unnecessary.

I don't think this is true, and I'm pretty sure it was NOT the reason for its removal.

Network rendering is mandatory for any production which makes extensive use of greenscreens, compositing, special effects, etc. The term "render farm" is well-known to those in post-production houses. There are dozens and dozens of posts in this forum over just the past year coming from people who have five minutes of video that takes several days to render. As the true pros in this forum know, that's just the way it is when you do certain things to video.

A multi-core computer can reduce render times, but is always limited by the number of cores available. For any production house that has to do this sort of thing on a regular basis, a render farm is the only viable solution because it can be expanded to a size only limited by budget and by network transfer speeds.

The Sony engineering team realized this a long time ago and introduced network rendering back in Vegas 5 or 6 (I can't remember exactly). However, it was clearly a quick hack, and not a concerted effort. Unfortunately, they never chose to fix the rough edges, and I suspect that the support calls and emails made the feature difficult to support. Also, the ability to use it in a render farm was severely limited by the "stitching" done at the end. This was done in a stupid way and so was very slow. That could have been fixed by some better engineering. The tougher issue is that the only video which could be stitched was video produced with codecs that Sony owned. Thus, you couldn't stitch MPEG-2, probably the most common delivery format, because that code was owned by MainConcept, and it is clear that they have never cooperated with Sony in providing the "smart rendering" capability which is needed even for non-network rendering, but which is mandatory if you want to stitch together segments rendered in a render farm.

I am sure that there were also licensing issues for these non-Sony codecs when used in a render farm environment.

So, RIP network rendering. It could have been a major feature that would have been used by many, many more people if the rough edges were removed, and the fee structure made reasonable.

John,

I agree with all your points, wholeheartedly.

Piotr

And I agee. It was one of the "features" that made Vegas a Superior solution in the NLE world. I dont have 18 hours to render out a clip. couldn't someone make a plugin? Vegas used to be about being fast.
Thanks Johnny for the informative post.

Did they document this feature drop anywhere. I did not see it any of the stuff sent on V10 and I have to admit I am extremely annoyed this feature was dropped as I built my enviroment to use it, and now willy-nilly without any apparent notice - it's gone. Quite frankly that is an unacceptable way to remove a major feature. First the Cinescore fiasco, now this, somebody is being very unfriendly to the customer. Is the goal to push people away?

Can't say I remember Sony ever mentioning they have dropped a feature. I know when the AVCHD Smart render was dropped in 9D that wasn't mentioned.