Windows 7: Video rendering and overall performance slow

Before I start let me just say that I'm new to this forum.



So, I'm currently rendering a 2-3 minute video and the rendering took about 20 minutes... I just upgraded my computer to a 64-bit OS and it works perfectly fine. But why does it take so much time to render a video in 1080p at 30FPS? I use Sony Vegas, by the way. Seriously, do I have to like do something because it takes FOREVER. And I have a friend who's PC is more than 4 years old and the rendering took less than 8 minutes.

Hello and welcome to the forums!

Can you first fill up your system specifications by following the tutorial below?

System Info - See Your System Specs

This will help us solve your conundrum.. without your system specs we wouldn't be able determine why you're getting the results you're getting...

EDIT:- Video rendering/encoding using x264 at 1080p is a very very CPU intensive task that would run like molasses for any system with less than a quad core or i7 sandy bridge or newer. As a point of reference my own aging laptop which is nearly 3 years old now has a Core 2 and takes 6+ hours to render/encode a 1 hour 1080p 24 fps movie clip using Handbrake

I have an AMD Athlon(tm) 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 5600+ 2.90Ghz Microsoft Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit Ati Radeon 4800HD Graphics Card. Is this good?

There's your problem... an Intel or AMD Dual Core @ 2.9 GHz will take ages to encode 1080p video at 30 fps... Your friend's pc might've been 3 - 4 years old but i'm sure it'd have to be a quad core because it chews through 1080p video faster than yours...

I'm afraid you'll have to upgrade your CPU to get more reasonable performance when dealing with 1080p video encoding/rendering/transcoding.. You have a decent GPU that's still okay for lower resolution HD gaming but your CPU could use an upgrade...

Thanks. I guess 720p will work as well.
EDIT: Wait, what if I render my videos in 1080p with Windows LIVE Movie Maker? It takes about 5 minutes instead of 4 hours. I want stunning quality for my Youtube channel. And if someone knows a good video editor, please let me know.

How much ram installed? Yes, a dual core will be slow. To help speed things up though, you need a scratch disk (second disk). When rendering to the same disk, your read/writes are going through the roof. Take a look at your task manager, then bottom left and look at your page number. Bet its real high. Most Video editing software will use every bit of memory, then will go to virtual memory (writing to a spot on the hard drive again).
By reading from one disk then writing to a second disk, your main disk isnt so choked up reading and writing. But as was posted above, you should use a quad core. Or, render while you sleep.

Adobe premier 10 is pretty good. Am still learning it coming from mac OS X. Keep an eye on newegg and you can sometimes get it for 50% off.

His read writes are probably low since his processor is taking so long to encode.

His read/writes are slow due to the rendering to the same disk, plus I'll bet he is paging out allot hence reading and writing more to the same disk. Yes, his processor is not the greatest for video editing. More ram and a scratch disk will help reduce his time. But I would suggest an quad core intel processor if he decides to upgrade his PC.

The CPU is the bottleneck, you can add the fastest drives you can buy, but won't help.
he stated he is encoding a 2-3 minute video and it's taking 20 minutes to encode.

Well, I have 2 computers. One is a Mac and one is a PC. On a Mac it took about 5 minutes for a 3 minute video with Sony Vegas at 50FPS. On Windows it took 22 minutes again. I don't think I'll find a good quad-core processor in my country... xP And btw, I get 50FPS when recording with Fraps.