Render Uncompressed as Intermediate Step?

[JoeInBH]

I have a tragicly old computer - 1.8 ghz P4, 512 ram. Frankly, I surprised Vegas will run on it. I'm pricing quad-core PCs and will be upgrading any month, but that doesn't help right now. Obviously, I have a lot of "monster renders" of 10 hours or more.

I'm doing a 4-5 minute project using Vegas for which I'll want to render out in HDV format for export back to tape, MPEG2 for DVDs, and flash video (for YouTube). The master files are in an MPEG2 format post 24P pulldown removal.

I have two goals, which may or may not be mutually exclusive - (1) avoid loss of quality from multiple renders and (2) only have Vegas perform one "monster render." Could I accomplish these goals by having Vegas render out to AVI uncompressed? There's my "monster render." Then, I'd like to just import the AVI file, with all the really heavy-lifting (color, transitions, effects, etc.) already performed and re-render out to HDV, MPEG2, etc.

So I guess my questions are:

(1) Am I correct in assuming that I will not suffer a loss of quality from re-rendering because the intermediate AVI file will be uncompressed?

(2) Am I correct in assuming that Vegas will be able to create the HDV and MPEG2 files significantly faster from a single AVI file than from my Vegas project, which contains dozens of clips, effects, etc.?

[Eugenia Loli-Queru]

You don't need to use the huge uncompressed files. Just render in Cineform via Vegas which is also an intermediate format and it doesn't has loss of quality. Select the Cineform codec under .avi and "custom".

[case]

Is creating a 'final cut master' for future rendering to various formats (instead of saving the project itself) the main purpose of an intermediate render?