Sony Vegas Platinum 9, Speed up video more than 4 x?

[Hellis 0]

I have a video that is about 36 minutes and i need it to be about 3 minutes.
Since you cant speed it up that much at once i figured i would render it at 4 x speed and then render it again.
But when i try to render the already renderd video i only get black video.

I tried to just CTRL and drag it smaler, I tried to set the playback rate, I tried to render the video as a 90 fps video. But none of that works.
The two first gives me black video, the 90 fps video works, but i think i made something wrong because it still plays one second as one second.

What am i doing wrong?
Is it codec related?
The original file is Mov, i renderd it to Avi with Xvid codec when i renderd the 9 minutes long video.

[DSE 5]

XVID is gonna look like shit sped up....and it will likely drop out post I-frames.

CTRL+Cursor to shrink. Then right click to INSERT VELOCITY ENVELOPE. This will give you a time of 12x.

Recompression (especially of a crap codec like Xvid) is a bad avenue if you have to compress more than once. Errors are cumulative.

[Hellis 0]

Velocity envelope does not exist in the platinum version.
Its a Pro feature only.

So render it as Mov instead? Or what do you recomend?
Could it be becasue of the Xvid that i cant speed it up more.

[DSE 5]

eeek! I missed the Platinum in your title....sorry!

Render to uncompressed if that's what you gotta do.
Yes, it's the Xvid codec that is creating black frames.
Even rendering to an AVI is better. Is it HD or SD?
SD...you'll do better with a DV file. Still sucky compression, but at least it's all intraframe compression (each frame stands on its own).

[Hellis 0]

Its HD, 1080p video.
Im right now rendering a few seconds of video to a mov "uncompressed", and i will see what i can do with that file.

It took three hours to render the 9 min video yesterday, and now i have to do it again

[Hellis 0]

36 seconds of video 8.34 GB.
20 minutes of rendering.
And completly useless.

By some reason i could not open the file.
Lets try it again. Yay

[DSE 5]

Shouldn't take anywhere near that length of time...unless it's a slow, old 'puter.
Render to QT animation codec, sequential png, tga then.
Even mp4 is gonna hold together better, but nothing of greater compression than DV is gonna hold together past 2 recompresses, especially if the source is AVCHD.
Or...download a trial of Pro.

[Hellis 0]

Normally it does not take that long to render, but as i said, it created a file that was 8.34 GB, and that was just 36 seconds of video.

I tried a few of the mov templates but they gave me some seriously bad video unless i used the uncompressed.
But i think i have found a mov template that gives me a good quality to size realation.

The computer i perhaps not the best, 2.26 dualcore (the old type) and 4 GB ram.
But usually it renders about 2x the lenght of the video.
So a 5 min video takes about 10-12 min to render.

But i guess its because of the speeding up that it takes longer.

[DSE 5]

speeding up means each frame has to be resampled. Using a GOP source means it also has to be converted, so that all takes time.
Were it a one-off deal, I'd download the trial version of Vegas 10.

[Hellis 0]

So you think Vegas 10 would do the job better?
Its 35% finnished now. But then i would have to do it again to speed it up a second time.
Im not in a rush
Thank you for the help, im amazed that it was the codec that screwed up the video like that.
I didnt think codec could make the video go black like that.

[DSE 5]

Vegas Pro does the job flawlessly, excepting with certain codecs. You can do up to 12x in one pass with Pro.

[fergs 0]

Sony has a February upgrade sale on - upgrade from your Platinum to Pro 10 for only $240 or so, less than half price. That's a great deal!!!!