Sony Vegas Rendering Times?

[Yadumadoda]

Hello, I've been questioning my render times on my computer.

General Specs
Phenom II X4 955 @stock
5850
4 GB G.Skill RAM
500 gb 7200 rpm Spinpoint f3
Win7 x64

I am importing AVI files, rendering them into uncompressed AVI, so I can encode them after.
A 30 second 720p video clip takes 10 minutes to render in Sony Vegas.
A 10 second 720p video clip takes 3 minutes to render in Sony Vegas.

Tested out: Sony Vegas 9.0 32-bit, Sony Vegas 9.0 64-bit, Sony Vegas 10.0 32-bit. The render times are generally the same.

I feel like 10 minutes is a bit too much for just 30 seconds.
One thing I noticed between rendering on my old PC and newer PC is that on my old PC, when I was rendering, it would use all 100% of my CPU. When I'm rendering on this PC, it uses at the max...25%. I have maximized the number of rendering threads and the affinity to all CPUs, put the priority on realtime/high.

So my question is, are these rendering times right or can they be a lot shorter?

 

[zealot1983]

U NEED A BOARD CARD

 

[srgess]

You convert what files into what files exactly ?

 

[Yadumadoda]

You convert what files into what files exactly ?

Uncompressed AVI.

 

[lungjian]

At what resolution are you starting and finishing? For HD, Vegas can sometimes render slowly, especially if you're changing the resolution.

Be sure to go into the Project Properties (in the File menu) and select 8 bit rendering. 32 bit generally provides little to no visible benefit and is mainly for broadcast or pro use.

Also, Vegas seems to work best with a symmetrical number of processors. If you have a 4 core processor, select 4 threads. Even with an Intel processor with hyper-threading, most users report faster results with hyper-threading off. If you're not adding any effects, you won't see much if any benefit from the additional cores. If you went from a faster clocked processor with less threads to a slower one with more threads, a simple file conversion with no effects will actually be slower. Once you start adding effects, the benefit of additional cores is phenomenal, becoming even more important than clock speed.

One thing I noticed a long time ago - Vegas strongly prefers matching processor and RAM speeds. Many motherboards now allow asymmetrical speeds for proc and RAM, even at default, so you might want to go into your BIOS (or use a software tuning utility) and make sure you tune it close to stock final speeds, but using matching base speeds (usually 333 or 400 MHz). Even if you have to settle for one or the other running at a slightly reduced speed, it might result in faster render times. Because Vegas verifies each frame after rendering, the slight delay caused by mismatched speeds is multiplied by the total number of frames and can result in greatly increased render times.

It's also ideal to have multiple hard drives. Ideally, you'll have Windows and Vegas on one drive, your starting files on a second drive, and your rendered files on a third drive. At the very least, having a second drive with the starting files and rendered files separated usually provides some speed improvement.