I'm having a problem rendering videos using TandemVids and Vegas pro 11. I installed TandemVids on my desktop computer for testing; I was able to get the templates built and run a few test projects through without any issues. But I just got my new laptop and things aren't working as great there.

When I start processing, the video goes through the editing process fine, but when it starts to render, it goes extremely slow. The approximate time counter goes up to about 6 hours and then slowly counts down from there. I've yet to let it run for 6 hours, so I don't know if it ends up with an error message or if it finishes just fine. I'm going to let one run now to see if I end up with like a 20GB file or something.

If I turn on test mode, or turn on the "open customer project in a new copy of sony vegas before rendering and burning" then render it manually, it takes about 50 to 120 seconds to render the video (testing with a 5 minute video).
I'll try to give as many settings as possible, let me know if there's something else you'd like me to check. These are the settings I use when rendering manually and when letting TandemVids do the render:
Using the DVD option.
Video Renderer: MainConcept MPEG-2
Video Render template: DVD Architect NTSC Widescreen video stream
Audio renderer: dolby digital AC-3 Studio
audio template: Stereo DVD

Laptop specs:
Core i7 2.4 Ghz
16GB Ram
Windows 7 64 bit
2 GB DDR5 NVIDIA GeForceGT 650M


So far I've uninstalled then reinstalled Vegas Pro 11.0 and tested using the 64 bit version and the 32 bit version. I've also uninstalled and reinstalled TandemVids a few times.

Any suggestions?

This is going to be tricky. Normally I recommend to get it working in Vegas without TandemVids and then use the same settings in TandemVids but you've done that. It sounds like you've done a lot of trouble shooting. I haven't seen the issue before and I can't replicate it here. Your computer should be more than capable of rendering faster than real time.

All I do is ask Vegas to render and then wait for it to finish. The code is fairly simple so there isn't too much that can go wrong at the TandemVids end.

I have a couple of suggestions but I'm not really sure they'll help.

Try a different rendering engine and template just to see if it's specific to that particular template. I have seen issues with custom rendering templates created in earlier versions of Sony Vegas and then selected for use in TandemVids and Vegas 11. The issue is different because when you render manually using the custom template, Sony Vegas throws an error, which is what confuses TandemVids. It hangs and doesn't start rendering at all.

I've had one person recently who was experiencing long render times - not six hours - who disabled resampling on the empty events to fix it.

Try setting the render thread count to 1. Close TandemVids, open a separate copy of Vegas to change settings and then restart TandemVids.

Try disabling the GPU for rendering. Close TandemVids, open a separate copy of Vegas to change settings and then restart TandemVids.

Try updating your video drivers, especially if the previous option resolves it.

YOU ARE THE MAN!!!

I used to do IT support for a living, so I know how hard it can be to troubleshoot a problem that you can't actually observe and tinker with (there's always something your eye catches that the user doesn't realize is important), or that you can't recreate on another system.

I have no idea why it worked when I rendered it manually, because I wasn't changing any settings. But what I ended up changing was the GPU Acceleration of video processing setting. Instead of turning it off, I noticed that it was set to a generic Intel card, so I switched it to my NVIDIA GeForce card and now it's rendering like a champ! There's no way I would have thought to check those settings without your help.

Thank you thank you thank you!