Vegas 9.0 Platinum: Smart Rendering

[Nadious]

I've been using Vegas 8.0 for awhile now in some video editing projects that I do. One of the biggest problems that I've had in the past (I have a whole other thread on it) is that I have to encode my source material into an MPEG that Vegas will use, usually taken from DVDs. I can't use converters such as VOB2MPEG, because Vegas get's all messed up with the output file, even though it plays fine in everything else. (I still can't figure out why that is.)

Anyways...

That being said, the newest version of Vegas 9.0 touts that it supports 'Smart Rendering' for MPEG2. I know that Vegas 8.0 has had some smart rendering support, but not for the MPEGs that I have used in the past. I downloaded the trial of Vegas 9.0 to see if this was going to help me with my issues any and on a test render, I'm noticing that the render time is no different from Vegas 8.0. I get an occasional frame of 'no recompress required' that flickers up, but I would figured if it didn't need to re-encode the whole MPEG, I should be setting that constantly and only a flicker of the parts that it had to re-encode due to changes.

I've looked ALL OVER the web for information about smart rendering with Vegas 9.0, but there's hardly anything anywhere. It's almost like nobody is using it or if they are, they aren't talking about.

Has any used Smart Rendering (no-recompress) for MPEG2 video in Vegas 9.0? If so, what should I expect to see when I render my video? Should it take as long as Vegas 8.0 did? My reasons for asking is I'm trying to avoid recompressing my video TWICE, instead of just once when I put it into Vegas.

[guns1inger]

There is no Vegas Pro 9 yet. Only Studio has gone to 9

[Nadious]

You are correct. What I meant to say was Platinum, not Pro. My bad.

[poisondeathray]

The fine print clearly states that smart rendering in Vegas Movie Studio Platinum 9.0 is only for "cuts only projects" or minimal changes (I am guessing that means ie. no filtering.)

Smart rendering (no recompress) for HDV and most MPEG-2 video
For cuts-only projects or projects with minimal changes

http://www.internetvideomag.com/Articles_2008/100308_SonyVegas.htm

[Nadious]

Well for a test, I dropped an MPEG video in there, didn't touch it, and rendered it to MPEG. Made no changes to it at all. Not only did the output file increase in size, but it went through and re-rendered everything.

So, I guess I'm curious as to what I'm doing that is causing this video to be completely re-rendered, if I didn't do anything to it after I put it into Vegas.

[guns1inger]

Perhaps it wasn't the same as your project or output settings

[Nadious]

I think that's where I'm having the trouble. That's why I'm trying to see if anyone here is familiar with using it (smart rendering.) I've tried setting the project settings to the same as my media (there's an option in Vegas where you can select a video file and it will set your project to have the same settings) but something must not be matching up.

[edDV]

Mainconcept's "Smart Rendering" requires identical settings for source, project and output. That means frame size, frame rate, CBR, bit rate, etc.

Change anything and it renders. "Smart Rendering" means that input frames (GOPS) are copied from source to output.

Easiest to use for settings like HDV source, HDV project and HDV output.