The new Vegas Pro 11 Render dialog

SONY Expert Advice: Tips & Tricks by Gary Rebholz

Let's face it; there's nothing very sexy about rendering your video and audio projects. Everyone hates the render step, but everyone also recognizes that they can't get far with delivering their project without out it. So, like it or not, there has to be a render step. That's the unfortunate news. The good news is that the new Render As dialog box in Vegas Pro 11 makes the process a bit more pleasant than it was in earlier versions of the application. The new dialog box offers several improvements that make it easier for you to find the exact render parameters that you want to use. In this article, we'll take a good look at the Render As dialog box and see how it makes your life easier.

To start, open a Vegas Pro project and choose File | Render As. Let's take a look at the dialog box, shown in Figure 1, from the top down. The Folder field displays the current file save path. If this is the first time you've ever rendered a project in Vegas Pro, then this field points to the Documents folder on your C: drive. If you've previously changed the render location, this field contains the location to which you last rendered a project. Click the Folder drop-down arrow. The drop-down list displays several of your most recent render locations. To reuse one of those locations, select it from the list.

Now that you've marked a few favorites, let's go back up to the buttons we skipped a few moments ago. The fourth way that the new render dialog box makes your life easier—and this is a big one—is that you can now sort your file format and template view in a number of ways. For instance, select the Match project settings checkbox. Now, your file format list shows only formats that have one or more templates that match your project settings.

Now, deselect the Match project settings checkbox and select the Show favorites only checkbox. Now, only those few templates that you marked as favorites a few moments ago show up in the list. This is an incredibly useful feature since, if you're like me, you tend to render to the same few templates most of the time. Figure 3 shows my Render As dialog box after I've sorted the file format list by my favorites. Deselect the Show favorites only checkbox. read more...