To composite or not to composite?

[Josh Bass]

A project in Vegas Video 3 I am working on has many many tracks of video. Most of these tracks are taken up by "special effects" which are basically cut out abstract shapes with several filters applies to them. Sometimes I have 6 or 8 (maybe more) of these layered atop one another, so that they appear simultaneously onscreen. What I'd like to know is whether I should composite these effects layers into one, or just output as is. Does it matter to the program? I'd have to render all the layers to output, but I'll have to do that to composite as well.

[Don Donatello]

you could do either ..

for a project that has 10-20% compositing :
if i have sections that has 5-8 video track compositing i'll render that section out to NEW video track and then insert that rendered clip into another copy of VV ( i copy the old veg and give it slightly different name, then delete the compositing tracks )..if i need to i can always go back to the old VEG and change the compositing ... now when i preview those sections in new VEG they will play back at 30fps ... and now i have 5-8 less video tracks.

when i render out later for final edit the composite section will not have to re-render... the DATA will just be copied ( unless change something in them)

now if your project is 80% compositing then you could just render to a NEW TRACK (which will give you 30fps play back) .

or if you don't need the 30fps play back while working you could just do a final RENDER at the end..

[Josh Bass]

Yeah, I can already tell what the effects look like, plus, if you just play it enough times Vegas will eventually do it right and in real time. I guess I'll just render at output.