To prevent Frame skipping, faster rendering

[John L. Miller]

I discovered something that may help those of you that have had problems with frame skipping and incredibly long render times. I figure some of you already know this and know how to use it. It is using the PRERENDER tool. Once you have your video edited the way you wish and you are ready to add your video effects, pick a frame that has a good shot of what you wish to add your effect to by clicking and putting the cursor on the timeline over that frame so the frame will show as a still picture on your monitor or secondary monitor. Once you have added your desired effects, (Make sure you are satisfied with this look), click tools and then "selectively prerender". Choose whatever template you desire..widescreen, 24p or whatever...then click your prerender or save button. You are prerendering all of your video and audio envelopes, track effects, etc. Vegas will create an AVI file for each video splice section. Once it completes, the screen will look just like it did before you started except you will see and asterisk after the filename. Now, simply press play and there will be no frame skipping or hangin now. Why? Because you replaced the realtime effect processing with the prerendered files. This is SO much better than frame skipping. Now, if you need any additional video effects, you can add them on the overall video out effects. DO NOT CHANGE the track effects once you have prerendered, you can, but if you do, Vegas will not be able to use the prerendered files for final rendering or playback since you changed your video effects on the video track. You will have to prerender again if this is the case. I use this if I need several effects to help cut my render time in half. For instance. If I want to use Magic bullet, sony color correction, chroma blur, sharpen, and brightness, I will add the chroma blur, sharpen, brightness, magic bullet to the video track itself, then prerender, then add the sony color correction to the overall video effect out. This way I can tweak the changes MB made. Or, I can add another magic bullet overall and it will play back so much better. Now if you add too many effects to the overall video out after prerendering you will be back in the same boat you were to start with. But, if you prerender most of your effects, you can see your playback as it will be when finally rendered, no frame skipping. You can continue to add sound tracks, or make other changes to the segments on the video track, if you do make changes on the previously prerendered video track, Vegas will only have to rerender the section you reedited. Now, when your ready, you can render to Architect or whatever you render to, and your render time will be less than half the time as before. The main reason I prerender is to be able to view my work BEFORE final render, on my secondary monitor without hangups or frame skipping and all the desired added effects will not interfere since I did prerender. I hope this helps some of you, I have asked many questions about stopping frame skipping and most answers were get a better processor..already have 3gb, others said use dynamic ram preview, but if your file is bigger than 2 minutes and hardly any effects added, this option is useless. But, this works. I am using it right now.