ObviouslyTech

One of the most common requests from Sony Vegas users, is “how do I speed up the rendering time of my video project” or “how do I increase the performance of Sony Vegas and make the preview window less laggy?” Today, I’m going to be going over some of my favourite tips to give to people rendering on Vegas on how to reduce your rendering time of your project and also one or two tips on how to increase the overall performance of your Sony Vegas editing program!

1.  Go to File > Render As.. . Select the template you use for rendering usually, and click “Customize Template”. A window should pop up allowing you to customize the template settings, make your way to the “Bit Rate” tab. Lowering your bit rate will reduce the file size of the final rendered video, thus decreasing the rendering time. I recommend keeping the bit rate between 3M – 8M .
2. Get rid of un-needed effects/video tracks. If you are using video effects that you don’t feel you need for your project, and you don’t think they make a difference to your video, remove them. The more effects you use, the great time Vegas has to spend to render your project. The same goes for video tracks, if you have several video tracks, Vegas needs to work to merge these all together, so the less tracks you have, the faster your rendering will be.
3. Close all the programs that are open on your computer that you aren’t using besides Vegas. Close your internet browser, your iTunes, your Skype, everything! This way your computer will be able to focus on running Vegas smoothly, and doesn’t have to worry about running your other programs. This way, your computer is only really trying to run Vegas, the rest of the processes open should be negligible (check task manager, CTRL+Shift+Esc) .
4. When you begin to render your video project, leave your computer. Close all programs, as suggested in Step 3, and leave your computer. Go for a jog, go outside, enjoy yourself (away from your computer!). This way, you aren’t using programs besides Vegas, slowing down your computer as described above!

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5. This is the most common tip, but I only recommend it if you are leaving your computer whilst Vegas is rendering, as described in step 4. Open up the Windows Task Manager (CTRL+Shift+ESC or use CTRL+Alt+Delete) and from here right click on Vegas.exe . Scroll down to “Set Priority” and set it to “High”. What this is doing, is it’s telling your computer that this program, Sony Vegas, is a high priority. Because of this, your computer will put a focus on Vegas and give it a priority above to the rest of the processes currently taking place. Remember to only do this if you are leaving your computer as it will decrease the performance of all other programs. Also, remember to reset the priority when you return after rendering, using the reverse of what you just did. Set the priority back to “Normal”.
6.  Enabling GPU acceleration in Vegas will also help to both reduce the rendering time of your video slightly and increase the overall performance of Vegas! To enable GPU acceleration, go to Options > Preferences and then go to the Video tab. For “GPU Acceleration of Video Processing” select your graphics card. If you cannot select anything from this drop down menu and only see “Off”, this means that your computer does not support GPU acceleration.
7. Finally, to avoid the laggy video preview, we’re going to reduce the quality of the preview. To do this, make your way to the drop down menu above the preview window which displays the quality of the preview. Click on the menu and select Preview > Half . What this does is it reduces the quality of the preview which eases the amount of effort Vegas and your computer has to use to preview the video in best quality. This will help your video project play and preview smoother, with a bit less quality.