I've been working with Vegas 9 for a little over a year now. I had to make the jump from Liquid Edition because of Avid shutting it down and I don't care for media composer. One thing that is still making me scratch my head is real time preview and/or rendering. I use Premiere as primary at work so I am basing it off what it does. Example: You have a clip that you have either put an effect on or adjusted in some way. In Premiere it will have a red line over it. If you play it, it will dummy down the video as far as it can to give as close to real time preview, very much like the choices you have in Vegas preview. If you want to see it full rez full motion you can render it, which in turn makes the line above green and it plays back full. Recently in Vegas I put a major effect on an HD clip. This is one of the first times that my system was not able to play back the clip full in the preview mode at the lowest setting. It was really taxing the system. No problem. From what I can tell if I want to see it full rez and frame, then I need to render it out to a different clip. Then look at it. Am I correct or is there a way to render it on the timeline so you can see it full? Last time I thought about this I hadn't updated my hardware but recently I did some effects that pushed my current hardware. Thanks for any and all input.

Vegas can also pre-render. Just go to the Tools menu and there are many pre-rendering options there. You can RAM render or render to a new file on the hard drive - whatever makes the most sense for what you are doing.

Just to add a little more detail, the choice of "Render to New Track" will place the new, rendered clip directly onto the timeline.

The background rendering in Liquid is the toughest thing to give up. But there are many, many advantages to Vegas that you'll discover along the way.

Thanks for the tips. That's been one of biggest hurdle to wrap my head around. I am liking Vegas more I use it. Thanks again.