I have been surprised at how long the rendering process takes when using a video software package such as Sony Vegas, So a couple of days ago I purchased some higher end components to build a new computer.
The rendering time reduction has been much better than I had anticipated...here are the specs for the old and new machines and times taken to render a 2 minute video as .wmv 6mbps HD 720-30p...
Old machine...
CPU - Intel P4 Core 2 Duo 2.8MHz
RAM - 3Gb DDR2
Video Card - NVidia 6600 (256Mb vid ram)
HDD - 360Gb, 7200rpm, Sata 1, 8Mb cache, Seagate
OS - Win XP SP3
Rendering time = 27 min 27 sec
New machine...
CPU - Intel Core 2 Quad, Q9400 2.66mhz, 6Mb L2 cache, 1333MHz FSB
RAM - 4Gb DDR3 (PC 10600)
Video Card - Point Of View GTS250, NVidia chipset, 1Gb DDR3 video ram
HDD - 1Tb, 7200rpm, SATA 2, 32Mb cache, Seagate
OS - Win 7 (Release Candidate)
Rendering time = 8 min 46 sec
So as you can see, the new machine performed the rendering in a third of the time...(improvement is >300%)...not sure whether much of that improvement is attributable to the OS...but I suspect most of it is due to the better hardware, particularly the video card which I am told has the capacity to assist the main CPU with floating point calculations.
Emma
Rendering is Purely CPU power, unless you have GPU Acceleration with certain programs & effects
you went from a Core 2 Duo 2.8 to a Quad 2.6ghz with 2 more cores with a much higher cache. It will be quite a bit faster.
Ram has minimal effect on rendering, mostly for editing ease.
If you want to speed up your system more getting an SSD or SCSI drive will increase write/read times (SSD will be cheaper in a year)
Why are you going from MOV H.264 to WMV? If you stayed with MOV or MP4 Rendering would be less as there is less transcoding & uploading online will have your videos processed faster.
Agreed with above, even staying with MKV container. The important factor to not to loose quality which at 6mbs there won't be, but will add time to the re-encoding. Keeping to MP4, MOV, MKV (and AVI with updates) container with the H264 \ X264 video codec and the audio AAAC, although it's recorded at a very low bitrate won't be as long as no re-encoding shoud be needed, or nearly as much due to the amount of tweaking you can do with H264..